I am involved with a soccer program at our church. We have grown from 120 kids four years ago to this fall we will hit 620! We need all the field space we can get so we recently renovated a Fescue turf area that had poor drainage and poor turf quality and replaced it with Tifway Hybrid Bermuda grass. Tifway and other Hybrid Bermudas make an excellent sports playing surface. The install of 52,000 square feet was done over two days. This short time lapse video shows the first day and how Big Roll jobs are done.
A few lessons from this job that I knew on a smaller scale from my own yard projects, but now understand they are compounded with larger projects.
- Killing and removing the old plant material (in this case Fescue) is the first step.
- Levelling and amending the existing soil is the next step. In this case, we brought in roughly 500 cubic yards of dirt and 150 cubic yards of soil amendments! We also had to drill and hammer out a large boulder to make a safe playing area for the kids.
- Installing the sod should be done right away after the sod arrives, particularly in the heat of summer. The two days of our install, it was 90 to 95 degrees.
- Related to the heat, WATER, WATER, WATER. Several short irrigations are better than one long irrigation.
Take a look at the finished field:
