With baseball season about to start swinging, we chatted with Todd Tribble, field superintendent at Oklahoma State University to get his advice for maintaining a playoff-perfect field.
Follow these five lawn care tips this spring and enjoy soft, green grass all season long:
- Adapt your watering schedule to the weather and the season. Adjust the watering schedule regularly to conform with current weather conditions.
- Schedule each individual zone in your irrigation system.“Scheduling” accounts for the type of sprinkler, sun or shade exposure and the soil type for the specific area. The same watering schedule should almost never apply to all zones in the system.
- Water only when needed.Saturate root zones and let the soil dry. Watering too much and too frequently results in shallow roots, weed growth, disease and fungus.
- Spring is a great time to perform core aerification in the yard. Core aerification is the process of removing small cores of soil and organic material from your lawn. One can typically hire a lawn care company to perform this service or rent an aerification machine from a local equipment rental facility. The aerification equipment typically is setup to pull cores ranging from 0.25 to 0.50 inches in diameter from the top 3-6 inches of the soil. The cores are removed or can be left to decay on the lawn surface.
- Mow regularly but do not remove more than one-third of the shoot growth in a single mowing.
You can check out more of the Turf Teamawesome tips for year-round maintenance and field care here: http://turf.okstate.edu/monthly-turf-tips