The significant improvement in the condition of the multi-sport
facilities at Dorset’s Hamworthy Sports Club has largely been put down to a
nutritional regime suggested by Headland Amenity.
Such is the progression in uniformity and quality achieved across
the football, cricket and golf surfaces that Head Groundsman Gavin Fisher has
been awarded Dorset FA Groundsman of the Year and Dorset Cricket Groundsman of
the Year - for the second season in a row.
Gavin has been at the club for six and a half years and is solely
in charge of the turf maintenance - a busy site that’s home to Hamworthy
Cricket Club and Hamworthy Recreation FC.
“When I joined the club, the feeding programme I inherited clearly
wasn’t working” he explains. “The golf greens in particular were suffering from
disease, patchy coverage and just a general lack of growth. While I had no
previous experience of Headland or their products, their Sportsturf specialist
Alex Hawkes stopped by and we got on straight away.
"He took some soil samples and spent time going through the
product range to formulate a programme that would be effective site-wide.”
For Gavin, one of the biggest challenges has been to create a
programme to improve surfaces, while sticking to a very tight budget. “Alex
fully understood that we needed versatility from the products, that could
perform not only on different playing surfaces, but adapt to weather conditions
and other environmental pressures.”
Key to the programme has been Headland’s ‘20/20/30’ Enhanced Plant
Health strategy. “We apply this tank-mix across both the golf and cricket
surfaces every month. It is used in conjunction with various analysis’ of Xtend
slow-release fertiliser which we can tweak as the seasons change and TriCure AD
Granular on our golf greens, to deliver more uniform water distribution, which
has helped us cope without an automatic irrigation system.”
“We also use Xtend on the football pitch, together
with Multigreen® temperature-controlled release fertiliser, which we
apply once early in the season and then again in the autumn.
"The beauty with the programme we have is, though it has
largely remained the same in the last few years, we have the flexibility with
Alex’s knowledge to make adjustments here or there if we think we can achieve
even better results.
"We are now reaping the rewards of our investment, having
made real strides with the health, appearance and playability of our sports
surfaces.”
