Sports- Post-Cultural Recovery
About Post-Cultural Recovery
Turfgrass researchers have benefitted from sports field cultural practices for years. Common cultural practices include proper mowing, irrigation, cultivation, and fertilization practices to maintain vigorous and healthy turfgrass surfaces. Thes practices allow turfgrass stands to outcompete weeds, resist and tolerate the stresses of insect pressure, and quickly bounce back from disease, drought, and high traffic. Sports fields endure a lot of traffic as large amounts of people cause wear and tear on an annual basis. This makes it even more important for the turfgrass surface to remain healthy, strong, and even safe to prevent player injury. It is also important to note that post-cultural recovery differs between warm season and cool season turf grasses including timing for invasive cultural practices that may require recovery time for the field. For example, spring brings about cooler temperature ranges that may provide better growth and recovery from the invasive nature of some of the corrective cultural practices. During the summer, warmer temperatures stress cool season grasses and naturally slow their growth rates. Therefore, intense summer cultural practices are hard to recover from in comparison to the spring. For warm season grasses, where bermudagrass is the most commonly used turfgrass for sports fields, it is best to perform cultural practices in late spring or early summer due to growth rates. Warm season grasses do not grow as much, if at all, during the early spring months. Overall, your turfgrass needs to be provided with the necessary nutrients it requires to bounce back from invasive cultural practices. Phosphorus and potassium help your turfgrass resist stresses such as these listed above, where as calcium will help build soil structure for proper nutrient absorption. Calcium is also responsible for holding together the cell walls of the plants and activate certain enzymes to help coordinate cellular growth activity. Carbon is an important factor for this as well as it helps balance out the C:N ratios of your soil, promoting microbial activity and increasing nutrient efficiency.
Sod: Soil Moisture Management
About Post-Cultural Recovery
Turfgrass researchers have benefitted from sports field cultural practices for years. Common cultural practices include proper mowing, irrigation, cultivation, and fertilization practices to maintain vigorous and healthy turfgrass surfaces. Thes practices allow turfgrass stands to outcompete weeds, resist and tolerate the stresses of insect pressure, and quickly bounce back from disease, drought, and high traffic. Sports fields endure a lot of traffic as large amounts of people cause wear and tear on an annual basis. This makes it even more important for the turfgrass surface to remain healthy, strong, and even safe to prevent player injury. It is also important to note that post-cultural recovery differs between warm season and cool season turf grasses including timing for invasive cultural practices that may require recovery time for the field. For example, spring brings about cooler temperature ranges that may provide better growth and recovery from the invasive nature of some of the corrective cultural practices. During the summer, warmer temperatures stress cool season grasses and naturally slow their growth rates. Therefore, intense summer cultural practices are hard to recover from in comparison to the spring. For warm season grasses, where bermudagrass is the most commonly used turfgrass for sports fields, it is best to perform cultural practices in late spring or early summer due to growth rates. Warm season grasses do not grow as much, if at all, during the early spring months. Overall, your turfgrass needs to be provided with the necessary nutrients it requires to bounce back from invasive cultural practices. Phosphorus and potassium help your turfgrass resist stresses such as these listed above, where as calcium will help build soil structure for proper nutrient absorption. Calcium is also responsible for holding together the cell walls of the plants and activate certain enzymes to help coordinate cellular growth activity. Carbon is an important factor for this as well as it helps balance out the C:N ratios of your soil, promoting microbial activity and increasing nutrient efficiency.
RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS
Root Driver’s is plentiful in phosphorus, which is highly essential to all plants. It helps a plant convert other nutrients into usable building blocks with which to grow. Adding phosphorus to soil that is currently lacking available phosphorus promotes root growth and winter hardiness, stimulates tillering, and often hastens maturity.
The importance of calcium for plant nutrition with the standard treatment often being gypsum, lime or calcium nitrate has been understood by sports turf managers for a long time. However, none of these solutions are plant available. Calcium helps maintain a chemical balance in the soil, reduces soil salinity, and improves water penetration into the soil, helping in the restoration of soil colloid flocculation.
Carbon is an important nutrient in your soil. It is one of the basic building blocks of all life forms, and with the proper mix of both carbon and proteins, all plants can benefit. A balance of carbon with the amounts of nitrogen you apply allows for overall lower N inputs and increased nitrogen efficiency.
This readily available source of potassium outcompetes the natural amounts of potassium that aren’t plant available within the soil. Proper potassium nutrition is critical for plants for water movement, energy production and the activation of enzymes that promote overall plant strength and immunity to stress. K&P balances out the amounts of nitrogen applied to your turfgrass