Photo Credit: No credit needed
How often have you seen a football field or another lawn area look worn, and wondered if you should fertilize it? I’m sure it’s happened to most of us. Then we pull out the tractor and spreaders, find some fertilizer lying around the shop that some salesmen told us to purchase because it’s the next-best thing to a perfect lawn, and send staff out to get it done.
Sometimes the results are not as spectacular as we hope, so we must look beyond the fertilizer bag. What is the soil telling you? What does it need to perform under the conditions that we expect it to endure, such as marching bands, football, soccer and baseball teams, camps and golfers?
Beneath The Surface
The first place to look is the soil. Without it, there would be no turf. Soil is not dirt--as one of my professors so profoundly told me in college, it is the root of all existence. Dirt is swept under the rug or out the door. Soil is a naturally occurring, unconsolidated or loose covering on the earth's surface; it is composed of broken rocks that have been altered by the environmental process of weathering and erosion. It is a mixture of minerals and organic matter from dying and decomposing living foliage.