The Useful Duck!

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Sunday, February 19, 2017

Turning the baseball field green again

I am getting used to my new position at work.
I really miss my old area because it was beautiful. There were happy pretty college girls who said hi to me every day, and there were very few time-sensitive tasks, there were NO coaches involved, students sometimes bought me coffee, the lady at Security gave me brownies and pumpkin bread, and I had my own area where I could attempt to climb hills with my Gator.
Now that I am the athletics groundskeeper the only real benefit is that I have the greenhouse where I can hide when it rains.
I find it very difficult to hide my farmer abilities when using them will make my job easier.
My current task is to try and get the baseball field green.
I have an issue figuring fertilizer rates on small acreages and using lbs per 1000 sqft. I'm not so good with the mathematics and when the results are meaningless to me I find I have to covert to lbs per acre to make sure I divided the correct direction.
Last week I applied Ironman to the baseball field as it was looking a touch on the yellow side.
Ironman is a slow release 12-0-8 fertilizer with 14% iron.
The Nitrogen percentage is not the biggest concern as the Iron is what greens the field. It also 0 percent Phosphate which is what you want when you have a severe problem with POA/Annual Bluegrass, The reason the field is so yellow is in fact the Poa problem. Which I will try to solve using a combination of a growth regulator and a wilber-ellis product called PoaConstrictor. To do this I need to get my commercial applicator's license. I'm not thrilled.
Here is the problem that plagues me.
The fertilizer spreader combined with my driving and lack of concentration is less than accurate. A difference of one 50lb bag on 30,000 soft is a visible difference. A 50lb difference on 30 acres is nothing. So...I applied 6lbs per 1000 soft on the baseball field and 10lbs per 1000 soft on the softball field. Basically because I put an extra bag in the fertilizer spreader and I didn't want to drive back to the baseball field to spread it out.
The math to put it into perspective for farmers like me.
6lbs x 43 = 258lbs per acre vs 10lbs x 43 = 430lbs per acre. The softball field is a beautiful shade of dark green...
Then there is the figuring of the fertilizer rates. Mainly total lbs applied vs total lbs of NITROGEN. This is a big one. According to what I've read sports fields should take at least 250lbs of N per year. Probably in something like six applications. Depending on the percentage of N in your mix this could be from 500lbs to 800lbs per acre of total fertilizer.
Or 11 to 18lbs per 1000 sqft total applied product.
But when you say 6lbs of N per 1000 sqft it sounds like a lot less...
My supervisor tends to get those two very important numbers turned around. I don't follow what he is saying because lbs per 1000 sq means nothing to me.
But, I suspect I'm boring you all.
I'm growing heirloom tomatoes, kale, collard greens, garlic, peppers and cilantro in the greenhouse but don't tell anyone. No one has figured out we maintain a compete green house to be able to rotate 14 plants in the library... Depending on how you figure it. Actually there are 28 plants because we rotate them.
Have a nice week...

4 comments:

  1. Being a grounds keeper sounds like rather complicated work. Its too early in the morning for me to check your math figures so I'll just trust they are good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Replies
    1. There is a product that does that very thing. There is a five gallon bucket of cheese he stuff somewhere

      Delete

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