Looking out of the window now, there is little by the way of a reminder that only a couple of months ago, most of the United Kingdom has been brought to a standstill by severe winter conditions: a blanket of deep snow and ice covered the countryside and as a result, public parks and sports pitches became unplayable.
Turf professionals, despite now having the sun on their backs, will still be working their magic on the rootzone to repair the ravages of the big freeze.
Most turf compaction problems are caused by man or beast walking or playing on the grass. However, sometimes there are other recreation activities that lead to severely compacted surfaces.
We have just spent three weeks treating compaction caused by the weight of a different kind of ice on turf: The Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park had a temporary ice rink stationed for all of December and January and thousands of people skating on top of it compounded the weight and the need for action.
We de-compacted the turf and subsoil to a depth of one metre deep with compressed air. Working at two metre spacings we then injected dried, milled seaweed to maintain the fractures and fissures we created, before back filling the probe holes with lytag.
Our next task, at nearby Green Park, we set about relieving the compaction caused by temporary buildings and a large generator at the Afghan Conference Media Centre site - we used Airforce Scamper and the original Airforce Terralift machines.
Enterprise PLC, to who we were contracted, have to keep the parks looking their absolute best in the summer for the benefit of the thousands of visitors from both London and further afield, and to do that they need to attend to maintenance in early spring.
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