TENNIS
Match Court 4, ten days after completion of renovation (including seeding and top dressing)
dressing. In a normal year, we would make a number of passes with a tractor mounted Graden scarifi er to remove any thatch build up from that year’s playing season, and combine that with some intense verti-cutting and mechanical brushing to remove any undesirable grass from the remaining sward. In simplistic terms, and while there is some cross over in what the operations achieve, we scarify to remove the thatch, and verti-cut and brush to remove undesirable grasses - namely Poa Annua (Annual Meadow Grass).
We therefore made a decision to scarify at a lesser depth than we normally would, with a view that, as our courts are heavily scarifi ed every year and there is very little thatch build up through the season because of our other maintenance practices, a one off less intense renovation would yield, at worst, a negligible negative impact on the quality of the playing surface. This less deep and intense scarifi cation would also allow the courts to recover more quickly after renovations were complete, giving us more time before winter fully set in to carry out any additional
autumn works we deemed necessary. The other area that we altered was to reduce the amount of time spent verti- cutting and brushing as part of our autumn renovations. However, the impacts of this decision could be more challenging. As everyone in the industry will know, anything more than a small percentage of Poa Annua in a sward can have a negative impact on the performance characteristics of a sports surface, as well as being signifi cantly detrimental to the aesthetic quality of the turf. This is a particularly big problem when you consider that we host an international ladies event which is televised around the globe!
To put some context to the Poa Annua problem, we aim to start our season with swards which are made up, as closely as possible, of 100 Perennial Rye Grass. However, in the real world 100% is a major challenge, so whilst we’re never happy to have any Poa Annua within the sward, if we can keep the levels below 2% we’ll consider the sward composition to be acceptable. Of course, as anyone who has dealt with Poa Annua will know, if left unattended a
2% sward presence in one year can very easily become 20% or more in two, and so whilst we needed to make compromises in our approach to renovating the courts, given the time constraints we were working with, we still needed to address the Poa Annua problem. The solution we looked to was Attraxor.
Circling back to the start of this piece, and our trip to BTME, Attraxor was recommended to us on two key points:
1) Its qualities as a plant growth regulator - such products are used widely now within amenity horticulture, and the arrival of a new active ingredient is always going to be of interest.
2) Its qualities as a Poa Annua suppressant - primarily through suppression of seed head production, but also for its ability to weaken even established plants over time.
To be clear, we know this doesn’t sound like revolutionary stuff . Trinexapac-ethyl, the active ingredient in products such as Primo Maxx and Clipless makes similar claims. In
The ability of Prohexadione to knock back Poa Annua means that, on swards which contain Poa, it is going to be a risky application
Dan Evans on Centre Court during 2020 season 90 PC February/March 2021
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