Grass Clippings
Rainfall records broken
Farming and turf management has a lot of common – both industries survive from nurturing a crop that comes from the soil. So, it pains me greatly to see the devastation that this winter has created to the land in many of the counties I have travelled through in the last six months. From Cambridgeshire to Worcestershire the sight of waterlogged pastures, on flood plains adjacent to rivers or low-lying fields has been repeated mile after mile. This will not register as the worst winter on record but will make the top ten for England.
The rain has been relentless, the water table was full to capacity well before Christmas and flooding has been the result. In February, rainfall totals have broken all records, and it is official that this will be the wettest February since records began, adding to farmers’ woes. There are reports that sugar beet is rotting in the ground instead of being stored ready for processing and spring wheat seed is sitting still in the bag instead of being drilled into the ground.
I’m sure these effects will hit the market soon enough. The farmer has little options to pull out of the bag, except to sit and wait it out and watch as yellow hypoxic grassland wallows in water. According to statistics gathered by the UK Meteorological Office, the overlying trend that our winters are becoming milder and wetter, is now beyond doubt. The weather patterns of the last few winters will be the norm. For sure there will be winter when an artic blast will bring snow, but rain will be the dominant force to contend with for decades to come.
Sport soil science emerged from the agricultural lab fifty plus years ago. Over the pond in the US, the universities of Penn State, Texas A&M and Rutgers in New York had programmes which helped define sports construction techniques for the United States Golf Association (USGA), while over in the UK; Aberystwyth and Reading Universities did some of the most pioneering work on land drainage and construction formations to help improve a plethora of sports over the generations.
Of course, the Scots will protest that they intuitively got it right, centuries before anyone else, with links golf courses situated on the foreshore and dune complexes of pure coastline sand construction for the greens has always been the order of the day.
It took the USGA Greens Section about 150 years to cotton on that the Scots were on to something. Today, laboratory testing of materials and analysis is commonplace for a greenkeeper and groundsman. We monitor all aspects of what is happening in the soil. We know the break down percentage of our soils into clay, silt, and sand. We will conduct tissue analysis of the plant to gauge the nutritional value of the grasses we sample to get an angle on the biological content of the soil. Who is eating our grass for dinner? A great deal of this background information is adopted from agriculture and, from fertilizer to crop protection products, the drip effect to the turf industry eventually comes.
John Deere, the company that most people will recognise for their big green tractors, is a $10-billion corporation with 83,000 employees worldwide. In the last ten years they have developed Combine Harvesters that are self-actuating. They harvest the crops and deposit the grain or arable product into the trailer to be carted off to the storage silo. All aspects of the task need no human intervention and the operation is remotely monitored from the John Deere Operations Centre. This application is also being transferred to the sports equipment that John Deere produces and likewise, Toro Turf Equipment are following suite. It is very much in the tentative stages, and I believe it is going to be some time before we see autonomous fairway machines roaming the course, but in principle the technology is already in use. Mowing fairways either with or without a human operator, isn’t really an option at the moment and certainly not until the tide goes out on the golf course. Like so many farmers around the country, we will have to sit tight and wait for the waters to recede.
London Play Charity – parks in need of love
The charity London Play has announced the park named ‘most in need of love’ as part of its campaign raising awareness of the value of play for children and communities. Bellingham Play Park, a local play area in Lewisham, has been voted playground ‘most in need of love’ with residents explaining it doesn’t yet serve the needs of young families. London Play’s director Fiona Sutherland said: ‘London Play was delighted to support the development of Lewisham’s play strategy last year and it is great to see it is now helping guide the council’s efforts and investments in improving play in the borough.
‘We know that councils are facing difficult financial times, and that play is often seen as an easy target when it comes to making cuts. But this is shortsighted. Play is not just ‘nice to have’. It is vital for thriving children and thriving communities too.’ Lewisham’s Grove Park Library Playground was also nominated in the campaign as were three playgrounds in neighbouring Southwark. Others were located in Hammersmith and Fulham and in Newham.
Wollemi Pine collection in Cornwall
Kernock Park, is a non-descript yet special valley side in Cornwall. It is the largest collection of Wollemi Pines outside of Australia and has been assigned as the UK primary grower and distributor of the pines. Wollemia is a genus of coniferous trees, endemic to Australia. It is the only genus known species, Wollemia nobilis, which was discovered in 1994 in a temperate rainforest wilderness area of the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales. It was growing in a remote series of narrow, steep-sided, sandstone gorges north-west of Sydney. The Wollemi pine is classified as critically endangered and is legally protected in Australia. After it was discovered that the trees could be successfully cloned, new trees were potted up in the Botanic Gardens of Sydney and Mount Anna and plants from this enterprise, were licenced and sold abroad which helps finance the conservation project. A Recovery Plan has been drawn up, outlining strategies for the management of this fragile population. The overall objective is to ensure that the species remains viable in the long term. Although often described as a ‘living fossil’, there are no unambiguous fossils of Wollemia and potential fossil records of it have been considered uncertain. Kew Gardens has some particularly fine examples of the pine to be seen in its tree collection.
Let’s Talk Trees
While mentioning Kew Gardens, Tony Kirkham, and David Johnson of Barcham Trees will be visiting the Club on 27th March to give a presentation entitled ‘Let’s Talk Trees’. After 43 years as Head of Kew’s Arboretum, Gardens and Horticultural Services, Tony and his team managed 14,000 trees and shared their passion for trees with the visitors to Kew. He is the author of several books and ran the ‘Treeathlon’ to support the Trees for Cities campaign for more trees in urban areas in the UK. In 2009 he was awarded the Associate of Honour by the Royal Horticultural Society for his services to horticulture. In 2019 he was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour and in the same year he was awarded the MBE in the Queen’s New Years Honours list for services to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Arboriculture. Click here for more information, book with the team at Reception (020 8480 4200) or log into the Members’ website and book online.