EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS
We are def initely
moving towards more battery-powered equipment to reduce noise levels
and become more eff icient. All of the gardeners’ vehicles in use for transferring equipment are already electric
and the remainder started back late August. Oliver Baldi-Turner and I helped at Barnt Green Cricket Club over the summer as they were struggling. Returning to an amateur environment was actually a revelation … it is a diff erent world and it made me realise how lucky we are to work at a venue with good budgets, support and equipment and it brought home to me how hard it is keep amateur sports grounds up to the standards expected, without the fi nancial backing and lack of equipment.
We have a strong team of fourteen who not only look after the school grounds, but many other sites including: pre-prep (which is around half a mile away from the Senior and Prep School campuses), boarding houses which require landscaping maintenance, Housman Hall Boarding House (which is just off the main school site), The Ryland Centre which off ers athletics and a fi tness suite and also Winterfold House School - where three of the team maintain the forty-acre site - totalling two hundred acres in total to look after.
The team is split between eight groundstaff and six gardeners. Most people (when they are lucky enough to be off ered a
head groundsman’s job at a school) will have a sports background and can look after cricket squares, prepare a rugby pitch etc. then, suddenly, you’re thrust into looking after fourteen hundred trees, fi sh ponds, forest schools etc. … it’s quite a daunting task, so I’m lucky to have such a strong team on the landscape/gardening side as well as the groundstaff ! My gardening knowledge is limited, but I thrive on looking after such a well-rounded team and getting the results, we are proud of … right across all the sites. We conduct a tree survey every two years and the team are experienced to undertake minor work, however we do have Benbow Brothers come in to do all the major works and a local tree surgeon will carry out any work that is too big for our team, but not big enough for Benbow Brothers. We spend a lot of money on trees and we have quite a big budget to maintain them; it is never ending but very rewarding. The oldest tree is some three hundred years old.
The soil is a mixture of sand and clay across the site and it has reasonably good drainage. It still means we do a lot of work on the pitches; even during lockdown, we added three hundred tonnes of sand. It helps
Fish pond 96 PC October/November 2020
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