Poor growth sets back Rushden

Poor growth sets back Rushden

By the time the season finished with the play offs, we didn't manage to start the renovation work until the middle of May. As well as the main pitch we have our training facilities on the site as well, so all the renovation work was carried out consecutively. Our first job was to fraize mow the main pitch and scarify the other training pitches, the scarifying operation was in four different directions, getting as much of the debris and thatch out, leaving as clean a surface as possible. The pitches were vertidrained and top dressed and then each pitch had around ten bags of perennial rye grass mix sown in, following sowing we've got quite good grass coverage.

There's a little bit of annual meadow grass around but I think it's inevitable that it's here. Whatever we do, the Poa returns!

On the first team training pitch we are waiting for some growth still to come through down the touchlines and some work to do on the goalmouths. But, in the next couple of weeks, we're confident it will be ready for training. Pitch No 2 is sitting on clay. The top 3" or 4" is 70:30 with a sand slit every half metre across the pitch. This year we've koro'd the top inch off to remove all the annual meadow

We have put it on with about 4 weeks to go. Last year it saved us really. The phosphate helped the establishment.

After the Koro had stripped off the vegetation the pitch was over seeded with 15 bags of Rye cultivars, we then worked 65 tonnes of iron sand into the pitch, vertidrained twice in different directions to a depth of 10", brushed all the sand in, fertilised with a 9:7:7 mix and then fed with a 10:15:10 three weeks ago and a 20:10:10 this week.

Although we have good grass germination, the growth this summer has been slow, I can put this down to the soil temperatures as they seem to have taken forever to warm up. All our pitches have struggled with the exception of pitch 3, this pitch had a good

On the main pitch there is a large orange patch in the goalmouth, the whole area is just sick and diseased looking. We have tined it with a pro-core and monitored it for the last few days.

For a while the goal area did get considerably worse, but we have put the fertiliser on and hopefully we will feed the disease out. If it doesn't respond we will spray with a fungicide, although it looks 100% better than it did 2 days ago but. We have lost a lot of leaf but there are encouraging signs with the new leaf looking fresh and green.

Anyway we struggle on and that time is almost upon us to embark on the next ten months of a season's play.