The Good and The Bad

In recent weeks the leaves have begun to fall which poses a couple challenges, both good and bad.  Leaves alone are a great source of organic material for the soil profile so we work very hard to make sure that we capture as many of the leaves as we can and mulch them back into the turf areas on campus.  Mother Nature puts a lot of nutrients into the trees and shrubs, so to pick-up the leaves and remove them from the system is not a good management practice.  (In a later post I will describe our methods of mulching such a large amount of leaves.)  Also, if not done properly and in a timely way leaves can also be a bad thing.


Along with it being a good practice to keep the leaves as a source of nutrients for the soil, and microbial life care must be taken so that the leaves don’t sit too long without being mulched.  Recently we had one of, if not the most, damaging snow storms in CU's history related to landscape tree and shrub damage.  The reason this happened is because with such a large and early storm, the majority of the trees on campus still had their full canopies to hold onto the snow.  Being so early in the fall, the turf had not hardened off for the winter yet either.  We spent two solid weeks with our entire staff working non-stop to try and make the campus safe from falling tree branches.  Just prior to the storm the leaves were starting to fall, and the heavy snow brought down not only large amounts of trees, but also defoliated the majority of the leaves, leaving extremely thick layers of debris on the still lush turf.  Once we started to get a handle on the safety aspect of campus and began to make progress on the clean-up, I started to take a look at the turfgrass under these thick leaves.

As you can see in the above picture the turf has a yellow look to it; this is called chlorosis.  It is evident when the plant is unable to make and sustain chlorophyll due to a lack of sunlight.  Since the plant is still in a stage of growing, it is still in need of nutrients and with the thick coating of leaves, was unable to produce the amount of chlorophyll needed.  This situation, if left unchecked, will cause loss of plants.  Depending on how dense the cover it can kill off an entire area and when the spring comes around the turf is all dead in that location.  The other scenario you can be faced with in this situation is lack of oxygen and abundance of moisture which can cause turf disease, again resulting in loss of plant material.  So obviously we had to make some adjustments to our manpower and clean-up operation.  Once the campus was in a safe condition we pulled a few staff member to start the process of leaf mulching.

If you were to see this in person the turf will almost have a look of being rotten.  Like any other landscape, debris in the early stage of decomposition is very limp, very damp, and over all just not healthy.  Luckily this situation though is very treatable just by simply blowing the leaves off and allowing the affected area to get some sun and air.  The condition will not be sustained and everything will return to normal.

You can see in the above picture that the leaf blades are yellow and in some cases brown.  The blades that are more of the brown color are the plants that are further along in the process and are starting to die off.  Some of those individual plants may or may not come back around.  I believe that we caught the situation early enough and made corrections so that we will not have any noticeable damage from this event.

So again, leaves are great for your home lawns and gardens but you need to follow the classic idea that there is such a thing as "to much of a good thing."  :-)

Ryan

Top dressing Kittridge Synthetic fields

As most of you know, the university has three synthetic sports fields along the east edge of campus.  These fields were put in about five years ago and have been a tremendous benefit to the CU Rec Center and the sport teams that use them.  Even though it is a synthetic field, it still needs maintenance due to wear and tear.  There is normal light maintenance done every year which consists of dragging the fields to help prevent matting and maintain an even playing field.  But depending on play, there are more significant maintenance tasks that must be completed like replacement of goal mouth areas and a top dressing of new rubber infill.  This year was the summer for that work and the Rec Center funded the replacement of synthetic turf in the goal mouths of the competition field and a top dress of rubber.



As you see in this short video above, we are using our large top dresser and applying crumb rubber just like a normal top dress of sand on a regular field.  The rubber is made of 100% recycled tires which is ground into a very fine granule, a little smaller than a grain of rice.  The amount put down was roughly 1/8" thick and was dragged to help work it into the synthetic turf blades.

During this project we used 12 tons of crumb rubber which was delivered in these large bag's called "totes."  This is a great way to use large amount of product because you cut down on packaging and the loading of it takes only seconds.  The video shows the loading of one of the bags into our top dresser.  This project went very smooth and the field needed it badly.  So now with the work we’ve done, we should be back to normal maintenance for years to come.

With constant talk of which field is better, synthetic or real, there are many points for each.  But the biggest benefit to synthetic is and always will be, the low level of maintenance compared to a real turf field.  It sure is nice to have 3 fields that barely need any attention and stay very safe and playable under all conditions.

Ryan



Parking on Lawns

For most large organizations parking can sometimes be limited because land is hard to come by in a large city environment.  Even though the university has some very large events, the frequency of such does not warrant the amount of dedicated parking spots to handle the large events.  So to deal with these few events which require large amounts of parking, the decision is made to use some of the open lawn area.  One of those very large events is student move-in.  This year there were roughly five-thousand freshmen moving into campus and, unlike regular events where alternative transportation is recommended, it is a little difficult to use that method to move someone’s home.

When we determine parking is going to be allowed on the landscape there are actions that will be taken to help protect the campus property.  One method is to actually place turf mats on top of the irrigation valve boxes so that the weight of the vehicles does not break the irrigation mainline.  Other steps that I use entail roping off areas to prevent vehicles from parking under the drip lines of our trees and shutting down irrigation applications.  This is done to firm up the landscape to protect the grades and prevent "rutting" from heavy vehicles.

Parking on landscape is pretty difficult no matter what steps you take but what you see above is a result of the use of the protection matts. Unfortunately the mats are black and with the high temperatures we had paired with relatively little cloud cover, the mats became extremely hot.  There is a pretty good chance this turf will actually come back since we only had these locations covered for about eight hours and then water was applied.

What you are actually seeing is a result of temperatures under these mats getting so high that the leaf cells actually burst.  A leaf blade is made of many individual cells, each having their own cell walls. These cells basically burst from the extreme heat, with the ruptured cell walls releasing all the chlorophyll and moisture in the leaf, creating this very burned out look to the plant.  In time with proper irrigation the plant will start to push new leaf growth and eventually what you see will be mowed off and fade away.  We were pretty lucky that the mats were not down for too much longer or the crown of the plant could have been damaged, resulting in turf loss.

Ryan 

Early Mornings

Being in the Turf Management field means being up early and out checking on things as the sun is coming up on a new day.  The week before the students move in is always one of the quietest times of the year.  Summer school has finished, many, if not all, of the large scale construction projects have finished and it is the final week for the grounds crew to be able to operate with little to no interference.  It is also a time when, just like graduation, we are working very hard to spruce the campus up for the large influx of new students and family.  Our fertilization is peaking at this time, irrigation practices are fine-tuned and mowing happens on a daily basis.

But there is just something about being on campus early, the sun is shining through the trees, there are hardly any people, traffic or anything other than a peaceful landscape.

I thought sharing a few shots of campus in the early morning light would be worthwhile.

Ryan





The Compost Tea Effect

For the past couple of months we have made and injected our compost tea.  Of course it will be years to start to get the full effect of the bacterial injection, but one thing we have noticed right away is something we call the compost tea effect.  If you have ever switched from normal diesel fuel to biodiesel then you may have heard of the biodiesel effect. When you switch over to biodiesel after using regular diesel, you have to change out the fuel filter frequently because the biodiesel frees up deposits in the fuel system that clog up the fuel filter. In time these deposit are flushed out and you can usually return to normal frequency on your fuel filter changes.

What you see above is organic debris that started to clog our nozzles a couple of days after the first injection.

Since we could not find anyone else who has injected the compost tea on this scale, we had not been warned of such a problem.  All of our heads worked properly and these nozzles were in the ground for years with the occasional clogged screen here and there.  What you see above are Hunter MP-Rotators, the 1000 and 2000 size head.  They are basically miniature rotors the retrofit into existing pop-up spray heads and have screen sizes to match each level, 1000 having the finest mesh size, 2000 having a slightly bigger size and 3000 having the biggest mesh size.  We initially didn't put two and two together until we started to actually find complete irrigation zones where these MP 1000/2000 nozzles were all clogged solid.  The only time you may see this naturally is if you just had a large irrigation break and large amounts of debris were put into the system.  That had not been the case in all of these location.

We worked pretty hard to make the repairs we needed, which actually turned out to entail replacing about 750 of these nozzles all throughout campus.  Then after some conversation and brainstorming we realized that the clogging happened just after our first inject of tea. We were not positive since we did not inspect every station prior to the injection, but the amount of clogged heads would have been noticed in advance of the first injection, so we theorized the tea caused it somehow.  So prior to the next injection we went to the majority of our MP 1000/2000 zones and inspected them to see if they were in good shape as a baseline.

At the same time we had another theory going.  Since almost none of our MP-3000 zones clogged we thought that the screen size of the 3000 series head must have been just large enough to allow this organic debris to flow through and out of the head.  We purchased a few 3000 screens and placed them on the 1000/2000 series heads.  Of course we were not very confident because there must be an engineering reason for the screen sizes based on the small gears inside the head, but it was worth a try.

We went forward with our next injection after establishing our baselines prior and we were able to confirm that the compost tea injection was somehow freeing up this organic matter and allowing it to flow down the system.  I believe that the tea product itself is not at a concentration high enough for it to be the clogging agent, but instead the bacteria in the tea eats away at organic material on the inside of the pipes.  Irrigation mainlines are really no different than rivers or streams in that there are dead spots and locations where water swirls and stays in place as water passes by.  After the injection there were about 12 hours until I ran another cycle the next night to "flush" the system out.  I believe during that time is when the majority of the organic matter is freed and travels through the system.

Once I had a good feeling and understanding of what was going on I spoke with our compost tea guru. He initially believed it could be a real possibility but then he spoke with a bunch of his colleagues and they all believe that what I'm describing is a result of the bacteria eating away at the organic matter lining the irrigaiton pipes.

We have done three injections now and every time, like clockwork, we are getting this result, each time with less and less clogged heads.  We are changing out many of the screens to the MP-3000 screens which has helped tremendously with this organic clogging.  We believe losing a few heads to true debris is acceptable while allowing this organic matter to flush through.

After all the work we have done building, testing and now injecting, we think we have found all the pitfalls and have started to make adjustments to account for them.  I still believe we made the right decision to inject this product and although there have been headaches, it has and is still very rewarding to do something in a way nobody else has.

Ryan