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Athletic Field Paint By Boyd Montgomery CSFM
Athletic Field Paint - How to figure out what is best for your fields!
The athletic paint industry has grown tremendously over the last ten years. As our professionalism in the industry has grown so has the quality of paint. The days of running down to the local hardware store and grabbing some latex white paint off the shelves is over! We are in the industry of growing grass not killing it!
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Love Your Sports Turf Manager By Boyd Montgomery
umor mixed with excellent information to share with coaches, players and parents answering the "Why are you doing that?" question.
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Skinned Area Maintenance by Connie Rudolph
Skinned area maintenance is one of the most important tasks for a Sports Turf Manager to make sure a field performs its best. There's a lot more to it than just "dragging". Water is the key to having your infield perform to the player's expectations. Through good maintenance practices, you can get and keep your infield in top-notch condition.
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Infield Mix by Connie Rudolph
There are two options for a baseball/softball infield mix. One is having a sand/clay/silt mixed product and the other is a crushed limestone product. The first is much more labor intensive and is used mainly by major league baseball and other higher maintained fields. The second product works very well for lower budget fields and is a good alternative. The main objective is to have a material that is firm, but doesn’t hold too much water causing wet playing conditions.
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Maintenance and Safety Checklist - Iowa State Univ
Sports field safety is a concern for sports turf managers, coaches, parents and turf industry manufactures, including Toro. Iowa State University has developed a Safety and Maintenance checklist and we want to share it with you. You can modify the checklist to fit a particular field or situation. Together, we can create safe playing surfaces for youth and adults.
DISCLAIMER - This checklist serves as a recommended guide only. The safety precautions set forth herein are not exclusive but merely set forth a list of suggested focus areas for baseball or football field inspections. Actual safety inspections must additionally take into consideration the intensity and frequency of use of each given facility, as well as other factors unique to the particular playing field or sporting event at issue.
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Water Conservation By Van Cline, Ph.D.
A Conversation About Water Conservation
It's no secret in our industry that reducing water use without sacrificing turf and landscape quality is a top priority. Living organisms including turf and other plants are composed of as much as 70 or 80% water. It's one resource we can't live without. Water conservation is without question a critical issue in turf and landscape management.
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Day By Day By Dale Getz, CSFM
Day by Day, Hour by Hour - A day in the life of a sports turf manager - making decisions and creating solutions through good management.
What a great profession. As a Sports Turf Manager you have it made. You get to hobnob with great players, provide playing conditions that help mold the next great players, and attend every sporting event. Your stress level is low because you love your work. Not quite true? Well, this is the perception that others may have of you. Whether or not any job is, in fact, this idyllic, one thing remains true of sports turf management...It is an exciting, challenging, and often rewarding profession, even if most people do not realize what it is you actually do.
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Soil Types by Perry Vayo and Anita Matlock
Soil, it turns out is a subtle and complex thing. It comes in many varieties, and the variety you have can be a major consideration when creating watering schedules for your home’s automatic irrigation system. The basic components of all soils are sand, silt, clay, and humus. When they are in perfect balance, you end up with loam; the fertile, free-draining, water retaining, soil that is the stuff of gardener's dreams.
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Aerification Options by Troy Carson, Agronomist
What is often called aerification is technically a form of cultivation, and because turfgrass is a perennial crop, we don't have the luxury of cultivating the way they do annual agronomic crops. Cultivation is important because it relieves compaction, creates macro-pores for water infiltration and gas exchange, and mixes soil with plant material thereby aiding in the decomposition of organic matter.
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Making Tall Grass Short By Dale Getz, CSFM
Mowing doesn't seem like a big deal other than it is time consuming, however, most don't realize what really happens when grass is mowed and how a good regimen of mowing practices can improve the quality of turfgrass in your parks and on your sport fields. This article will examine the physiological effects of mowing, the differences between rotary and reel mowing and offer suggestions for making the process of mowing kindler and gentler on your turfgrass.
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Scheduling for Water Conservation by Jim Laiche
One of the first industries singled out for excessive water use during drought periods is the landscape industry. We do not necessarily use more water than other industries but we tend to be restricted more because of our high visibility.
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High Tech Sports Fields by Dale Getz, CSFM
As everything else in today’s world, even sport fields are going high tech. But what does that really mean in the construction of sport fields and what are the benefits to you? Here are some high tech basics: High tech fields are built with a high content of sand (~80%), usually a smaller proportion of an organic component such as peat (~15%) and sometimes a soil amendment such as calcined clay or diatomaceous earth with specific water and nutrient holding characteristics (~5%). This mixture of sand, peat and amendments is called the “root zone” and can vary from 8 to 12 inches in depth. It is usually placed over 4” of gravel. Almost all high tech fields have an underground drainage system to carry excess water away from the site and an automated irrigation system is a must. This article isn’t going to be a “how to” article but rather an exploration of the concept and what a high tech field may or may not do for you.
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