SUMMER MAINTENANCE
We can’t expect facilities managers to be expert horticulturalists, but as GRITIT argues, having a seasonal approach to planning the year can help you stay in control.
IT’S ALL IN THE STRATEGY
For busy FMs, grounds maintenance (GM) is just one of many competing priorities and with pressure to keep budgets under control it can be easy to prune your investments in GM in ways that end up costing more long term.
In many instances this is the same dilemma familiar to anyone in facilities management – how do you best balance the potential costs of acting reactively versus the added investments needed to develop plans and specifications for effective maintenance?
With the breadth of skills and responsibilities involved in modern facilities management only increasing, not all FMs are fully equipped to take a more strategic view of grounds maintenance and adopt a more cost-effective PPM (planned preventative maintenance) orientation.
However, a grasp of the basics can go a long way and help FMs with responsibility for outdoor areas to start to think about the lifecycle of outdoor spaces to better manage the seasonal nature of grounds maintenance. Doing so is the key to managing your landscapes, budgets and contractors alike.
How to approach your year strategically To gain a high level understanding of the grounds maintenance year, the two infographics are a great place to start. Naturally every business and every site is different, but together these offer a useful starting point that can be adapted to your requirements. The Grounds Maintenance Planner can be used to track your teams’ or contractor’s current work and service reports and gives a sense of what to expect now and the coming months. The Soft Landscaping Planner provides an understanding as to the optimum times to make improvements or changes, such as extending beds, creating more naturalistic areas or planting.
Don’t cut back excessively in colder months Without doubt, summer is the most intensive period for lawn care and turf management, but activity is seasonal and should continue right throughout the year. In the attempt to cut costs, many organisations significantly reduce grounds maintenance during the winter, for example by reducing the number of site visits.
However, this can be a false economy: some of the most beneficial care is carried out in the coldest months to help lawns grow healthily and free of moss during the summer, and this is true for grounds maintenance as a whole: In any given season, the work you’ve done in the preceding period is often the key to success.
During winter, grounds maintenance teams should focus on conditioning the grounds to get a head start for spring. Collect leaves and debris that can build up and destroy lawns. Cut the frequency of site visits in winter, and you simply add more cost in springtime to bring these areas
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back up to standard. Neglecting clearing decaying leaves on lawns or hard standings can also form a substrate that allows weeds to germinate. This then requires more weed control as well as unnecessary and costly chemical treatments during the summer growing season.
A less obvious implication of cutting back on grounds maintenance during certain times of year relates to health and safety, as risks on site may not be identified and mitigated in time. Here too, there’s a case to be made for a more joined up approach to outdoor facilities management with regard to winter gritting.
It clearly makes sense for grounds maintenance teams to use the weeks when snow and ice clearance is a priority to also monitor grounds maintenance requirements that arise.
Preparing for summer From a horticultural point of view, late spring into early summer is an ideal period for activities such as planting bedding plants and hanging baskets. However, this is when FMs and site managers also need to get to work
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