Winter Sports - Football
pop-up heads didn’t reach some areas of the pitch, even on the stillest of days, and we had to bring in additional hosepipe and sprinklers to water these missed areas. Of course, when there was a breeze (STFC has exposed corners and it always seems to have good air flow) the sprinklers could be marginalised by up to 10m and large areas would be missed.
The germination of the seed Pitch power harrowed
remained poor and, although we could see an increase in shoots coming through, the grass seemed to be really struggling; it appeared to be slowly growing under its own steam. Friday the 12th June - there
Loading concentrated Loksand
were some areas of the pitch that seemed to be accessing available nutrient. In these areas, the new grass was at two leaf stage and about 50mm long, whilst most other areas looked yellow and sickly. Andrew and I decided to give the pitch a cut with a ride on rotary to see if we could stimulate some more growth. It was cut at 35mm but, apart from the most vigorous areas, we barely took anything off it. Richard returned from his
holiday, refreshed and raring to go. He could see the work that Andrew and I had been putting in on the pitch, the training pitch behind the stadium and the six acre Sundorne Castle training ground a couple of miles up the road.
We continued to monitor the
water on the pitch, applied 15l of seaweed on the 16th, rolled the pitch with cylinder mowers on the 17th and sprayed with 10l of Bullet Calcium and another 10l of seaweed on the 18th. The high iron content in the
Grading using Blec box garder
pitch was our best guess for why the pitch was so unresponsive, as it locked up any nutrient availability. It remained a puzzle as to why there were a few areas that didn’t appear to have a problem. The iron content had been put down to the use of a bore hole at the ground that helped fill the irrigation tanks. From day one, we had turned off the bore hole and had only been using mains water for irrigating, but it was going to take time to flush through the pitch, if that was possible without the use of wetting agents. The grass being so youthful, it was felt that the use of wetting agents should be held back, at least for the time being. On the 22nd we sprayed the
Overseeding with Blec 72 I PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015
pitch with 40kg of Everris 35:0:14 water soluble fertiliser to try and
“
For a brief twenty-four hours you could see a visible improvement in the plants, but it faded away again just as quickly
see if we got any response from the plants. Eureka! For a brief twenty-four hours you could see a visible improvement in the plants, but it faded away again just as quickly. These young plants were like babies, only able to uptake small quantities at a time, so needed regular feeding. Having finally seen a response, albeit small, from the grass, we decided to step up small but regular feeds and, on the 24th, we cut the pitch with cylinders for the first time and then sprayed a concoction of products in the afternoon. Biomass sugar at 20l, Seaweed at 10l and 80kg of Step Hi-Mag. Thursday 25th - We cut the
pitch at 30mm and removed ¾ of a box of clippings each with our Dennis G860s. The grass response was still up and down daily, so we again applied a concoction of products on the 26th, using 40kg of 15:0:43+Fe water soluble fertiliser, 5l of Bullet Trace Elements, 15l of Maxwell Sea Action Seaweed and 40l of Fulvic 25. This all sounds like a lot but,
with four weeks to go to the first pre-season game and the club having agreed to play three home games in eight days, we couldn’t leave anything to chance, as my promise to the club had been to significantly improve all their surfaces; something that the CEO had taken one step further and publicly went on record saying “I’d promised him a Premier League surface!” Joking apart, my professional reputation was on the line and there was no way I was being beaten by this pitch. I took Matt, the CEO, for a walk on the pitch to show him the issues, I remember saying that the grass was swimming in a sea of nutrition, we just needed the seedlings to establish enough to
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