How to keep a sports pitch playable during the Winter

I can picture the Monday aftermath of the weekend storms with enormous puddles across many playing fields throughout the British Isles.

In some cases, especially on heavy clay, the water will find hydraulic conductivity slow or even impossible - the lack of drainage may result in many football and rugby games being called off this coming weekend as groundstaff grapple with waterlogged soil conditions.

Inaccessibility with ride-on equipment means that only light forking can take place, an operation, in isolation, futile for hard pressed turf professionals to present a playing surface that is acceptable to sports organisations - fixture build-up could create extra pressure on the head groundsman that may result in a surface being played on in less than favourable conditions - further exacerbating the poor conditions.

We can help local authorities and sports clubs overcome the problem - those forced to cancel football matches following the late summer drought, and now faced with unplayable surfaces as rain turns them into mud have the opportunity to deploy one of our Terralift fleet to break up this surface tension and compaction and remove any restriction from the flow of surface water deep into the subsoil where it cannot cause further problems.

The Airforce Terralift machine is ideal to break through hardened pan layers - the JCB breaker gun (used to break up road surfaces) hammers the hollow probe one metre into the soil however hard and compacted it has become. Inferior equipment has a tendancy to bounce off of the resistance.

Once the Terralift’s probe has penetrated one metre into the subsoil a controlled blast of compressed air is injected fracturing and fissuring the soil as it makes its way to the surface. Importantly, on the tail end of this air blast dried, milled seaweed is released which sticks to the walls of the fractures, swelling and contracting, creating movement within the soil and keeping the air fractures open.

If you need help scheduling your winter fixtures then why not give us a call or pop us an email?