TENNIS
Dan Evans on Centre Court during 2020 season
No chemical replaces good, basic turf management, and there is no point applying the marginal gains that a chemical offers if there are signif icant def iciencies in basic maintenance
nitrogen. We then completed the rest of the renovation procedures before leaving the court to settle.
Within a few days, we began to see evidence of the Prohexadione taking eff ect. On grass tennis courts, it isn’t unusual for Poa Annua to be concentrated around the edges of the surface where the grass meets the surrounding concrete ring beam. Generally, this is because it is the most diffi cult area of the court to use mechanical equipment to remove poor growth, whether that is a tractor mounted scarifi ers or pedestrian verti-cutting/brushing equipment. That problem is amplifi ed on our courts, as when they were constructed just under a decade ago, the contractor did not allow for sinkage, and so we’re still slowly, year-on-year addressing the fact that the perimeters of our courts sit higher than the grass! This means that we have a small strip of grass around the edge of our courts that has to be hand cut occasionally, and raked out manually if we want to thin it out at all. This strip came in incredibly useful though, as it off ered the fi rst sign of some incredibly encouraging results. As the included pictures show, the Poa Annua around the edge of the court was, within days, beginning to suff er. Within a week or so, when we were able to get on to the court itself, we also found evidence of smaller patches within the main body of the court
where Poa was starting to suff er, and be outcompeted by the new grass plants we had sown just a week or so prior. Unsurprisingly, with those observations, we didn’t hesitate to continue rolling out Attraxor across our other courts as we renovated, and with weather proving favourable we applied a follow up dose to each court at twenty-one days after its initial dose. Visual results continued to demonstrate an ability to knock back the Poa, and allow the new grass to outcompete and take over where Poa populations were already thin, whilst on surround strips where mechanical works are trickier we were able to manually rake out the Poa before topping up seed and dressing. We should also point out that we saw no ill-eff ects with regards the desirable grasses within the sward.
With these observations, we circle back to our original point at the start of this article; We believe that Attraxor will prove to be the next revolutionary product to become commonplace in the turf manager’s arsenal. Despite that grand prediction, we should though issue some words of caution. Firstly, that our prediction is based on two applications made as part of our autumn renovations. While we see no reason to predict a signifi cantly diff erent outcome from using Prohexadione earlier in the growing season, we personally haven’t done so yet,
Our f inancial position doesn’t dictate a bottomless pit of money (in fact, reality is far from it!) and so we weren’t able to increase productivity by using twice the manpower with twice the equipment
Post renovation Poa PC February/March 2021 95
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