Friday, 22 January 2010

Turf

In 2008 the gardening team returfed the banks in the main quadrangle with Crested Hairgrass turf. This turf is made up of 100% Barkoel Crested Hairgrass, Koeleria macrantha, which poduces an extremely dense turf with a very slow growth rate. Unfortunately, the turf have been contaminated with some meadow grass, which grows at a faster rate, thus creating patches of lush, long grass amongst the slow growing dense grass. In order to repair this, we are attempting to grow our own Crested Hairgrass turf so we can replace all the odd looking patches of meadow grass.

First the trays are filled with a mix of sandy loam and compost, then the mix is levelled to make a smooth flat surface for the Barkoel Crested Hairgrass seed to be sown on.
After the seed has been sown the compost is seived over the top and watered. We now have eight large trays waiting for the seed to germinate and over the next few months we will have created new turf for us to use in the banks.






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