While some sports may be seasonal, sports fields lawn maintenance requires year-round attention. The sports field’s job is to facilitate the game, give optimal ball roll and minimise injuries. Whether you are a golfer or rugby player, achieving the perfect turf, is all about your lawn maintenance routine.
It takes rigorous work and a well-thought-out sports field lawn maintenance schedule to keep the grass maintained. A sports field is similar to that of servicing a car, capital needs to be spent to ensure a healthy sports field is maintained.
Even with the perfect plan, pests crawl in or the grass suffers from being neglected and it fails to thrive. This can result in the sports turf having to be repaired with a lot of time and money going in at the same time.
Start With Your Sports Field Lawn Maintenance Now
When spring has sprung, it’s officially sports season. So start planting the seed now and enjoy the fruits of your labour as the weather starts warming up. By ensuring you take care of your sports turf now, you will be on the front foot to success.
Our Favourite Turf Varieties for Sports Field Lawn Maintenance
Lawn maintenance can provide you with better results if you’re wise about your care routines, grass types and your approach to care. FSG’s favourite grass varieties are straightforward – we choose these grass types because they give the best results:
Artificial turf
Artificial turf is gaining popularity, its maintenance is simpler than that of real grass. It requires no water, fertilisers and pesticides which provides enormous monthly overhead reductions. Artificial turf is versatile, easy to maintain, safe and the monthly costs to keep it in pitch-perfect shape is extremely low.
Kikuyu (Pennisetum clandestinum)
A popular lawn choice in South Africa, Kikuyu offers rapid growth to the point where some regions consider it an invasive species, but ideal for a lawn. It reaches a height of 70 – 150 millimetres, and it thrives in sandy soils. Its inexpensive qualities combined with its drought tolerance makes it hardy enough for dry regions and cost-effective to maintain. Kikuyu can be top-dressed to add smoothness to the lawn surface.
Cynodon Dactylon “Princess” 77
This deep rich green variety is medium to fine in texture creating thickness. Easy to please, it enjoys full sun, relatively humid conditions, and tolerates heat exceptionally well. It also requires little water meaning that ongoing maintenance is fairly easy. A thin thatch layer gives you greener grass that requires less manpower in the form of aeration and tilling to keep it evergreen. This lawn type can be lightly top dressed for added smoothness.
LM Lawn (Dactyloctenium Australe)
LM lawn is indigenous to South Africa and it offers superior shade tolerance. While it does withstand foot traffic, its true talent lies in its ability to thrive in hot and dry conditions and its super-fast growth. It grows in a variety of soils and remains green and lush throughout the seasons, even winter and can be mowed at 6cm. It is important to establish smoothness at installation as this lawn cannot be top dressed.
Advice from the experts around general lawn maintenance.
Once you have established the turf variety of your choice, you may run into some issues on your maintenance journey. The grass may show bare patches of earth, it may recede, it may turn brown, or cease to grow all together. The following services from FSG’s lawn care regimen will address the relevant problem and return the lawn to its state of former glory.
Scarification – removing the middle layer of the grass for a greener and well-nourished lawn.
Aeration – for looser soil around the roots to promote breathing and better water and nutrient uptake.
Topdressing – this practice addresses uneven terrain, it improves soil drainage, and repairs areas showing heat or chemical stress on specific grass types, as mentioned.
Hollow Tining – a more aggressive form of scarification to aeration, to increase the green layer of grass by removing the dead layer.
Sports Field Lawn Maintenance Is A Full time Commitment
Maintaining an ever-green and ever-ready lawn that’s waiting for sportsmen is a full-time job and in our case, it’s simply a matter of working smart to deliver fast results. Creating and maintaining turf for sports fields is one of our favourite services we offer. We use the latest technology in the industry offering our clients access to an image library of their premises. Our photo-reporting system gives you visual records of the state of your sports field. Enjoy a play-by-play of every improvement we’ve made, documented and stored for you.
Also read more about Irrigation Systems HERE
