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COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

August 16, 2023/in News, Press Release/by Lucy Nicholls

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens: Ian Dickson, a bowling green contractor, believes that COMPO EXPERT products have proved to be top of range without the premium price tag. Ian originally started his career in greenkeeping but switched to bowling green maintenance ten years ago. While admitting it is a completely ‘different […]

Potential unleashed

August 16, 2023/in Turf Spotlight/by Admin

Potential unleashed: Millfield School has an enviable roll call of high achieving alumni. Scott MacCallum speaks with Craig Richardson, Head of Grounds and Gardens, to find out how they do it. Ask many people at which school they would have loved to have been a pupil and I’m pretty sure the name Hogwarts would feature […]

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

August 16, 2023/in News, Press Release/by Lucy Nicholls

Potential unleashed

August 16, 2023/in Turf Spotlight/by Admin

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COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

August 16, 2023/in News, Press Release/by Lucy Nicholls

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens: Ian Dickson, a bowling green contractor, believes that COMPO EXPERT products have proved to be top of range without the premium price tag.

Ian originally started his career in greenkeeping but switched to bowling green maintenance ten years ago. While admitting it is a completely ‘different animal’, Ian says he quickly got an appetite for maintaining bowls greens and has done so ever since.

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

He explained how he first started using COMPO EXPERT products on bowls greens.

“In my greenkeeping days I used to order a lot of products from Agrovista Amenity (the exclusive national distributor of COMPO EXPERT’S turf products in the UK) and my representative was Ramsay MacGregor. I stayed in touch with Ramsay when I switched to bowls because he is very knowledgeable, and he gives valid reasons behind using products.

Ramsay is genuinely interested in a plant’s health and his advice is key to my operations.

“Ramsay came in and looked at the bowls greens I was working on. He suggested using some COMPO EXPERT products and explained how they had been getting great results on some golf courses, so I decided to give them a try.”

COMPO EXPERT believes in sustainable, integrated turf management by focusing on modern fertilisation concepts, consistent regeneration of growth and optimal support of the plant’s own physiological processes. All of which promote vitalisation, stress tolerance and root development while providing optimum turf quality.

The innovative product range includes specialty mineral and stabilized fertilisers, slow and controlled release fertilisers, water soluble and liquid fertilisers as well as biostimulants, trace elements and soil conditioners.

The first product Ian tried from the COMPO EXPERT range was Fertilis® Speed, an NPK complex fertiliser with emphasis on nitrogen for spring and summer application to promote growth and a quick green-up.

“The green where we applied the Fertilis® had a lot of bare areas and the growth has been tremendous,” said Ian. “We applied it in May and had a full 12 weeks out of it. There has been less disease, the sward is a lot thicker, and even during a big drought period the greens performed superbly.”

Ian also maintains a sand-based green which is prone to leaching. For this green he applied Floranid® Twin Eagle K – an extra fine granulated slow-release complex fertiliser of excellent solubility.

“The nutrient levels on this green are very hard to maintain. With the Twin Eagle K, you don’t get the flush of growth in the way you would from the Fertilis®. Instead, you get an even, consistent growth. I judge the consistency of it by looking at the amount of grass cuttings I take from the mower each week. We get three boxes of cuttings three times a week and that underlines how consistent the Twin Eagle K is. Again, we get excellent results.”

Ian claims that he has been very impressed with the longevity of the products and believes that there isn’t much on the market that can beat COMPO EXPERT products in terms of performance and price.

“A lot of other fertilisers just don’t have the longevity that these do,” he said. “We were using a cheaper fertiliser in the past and I was applying twice as much product, so it ended up costing me more.

“The COMPO EXPERT products are top the range, but you don’t pay top of the range prices for them. They are very fairly priced compared to their competitors.”

For more information about Agrovista UK, visit www.agrovista.co.uk/amenity

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Potential unleashed

August 16, 2023/in Turf Spotlight/by Admin

Potential unleashed: Millfield School has an enviable roll call of high achieving alumni. Scott MacCallum speaks with Craig Richardson, Head of Grounds and Gardens, to find out how they do it.

Ask many people at which school they would have loved to have been a pupil and I’m pretty sure the name Hogwarts would feature strongly.

Not for me, though, the school I would have loved to attend is Millfield School, in Somerset.

Potential unleashed

I grew up learning about the great names who had been educated, and honed their sporting prowess, at Millfield School and I wanted to join them, not because I was particularly adept at any sport. Quite the reverse, I’m pretty inept at most sports. But I love sport and while I was never likely to achieve what the likes of Sir Gareth Edwards, Duncan Goodhew, Helen Glover, Adam Hastings, Tyrone Mings, Andrew Castle, Lando Norris, Chris Robshaw, Mako Vunipola and Huw Jones, to name just a handful, I would undoubtedly have become more proficient with some top quality coaching.

The site itself is phenomenal, and coupled with coaching of the highest quality, you can see exactly how the school has acquired its reputation.

No amount of talent or high level one-to-one coaching, however, can succeed without a quality surface on which to show off skills, and the man in charge of managing the sports surfaces, as well as maintaining the fantastic gardens around the school grounds, is Craig Richardson, Head of Grounds and Gardens.

“The brilliance of this school is that we pretty much cover every sport. It’s not just football and rugby in the winter and cricket in the summer, we’ve got grass tennis courts, we’ve got golf, we’ve got equestrian, the list goes on. Up until this year we had our own polo pitch and we still have an annual polo event. It’s a fantastic spectacle,” said Craig, in his calm north east accent.

With such a range of sports for which to provide surfaces, the entire site is 240 acres, Craig is fortunate to have a strong team of over 20 whose goal, set by Craig, is akin to those goals set for the elite sportsmen and women who are lucky enough to attend the school.

“We try to maintain our sports surfaces as close to professional surfaces as we can. There are going to be constraints because of time and also finance, but that is what we try to do.

“And we try to take it one stage further because, rather than just look for those standards for the first team pitches, we want to make all of our pitches to the same standard. So, whether it’s the under 15 Cs or the A team, I believe they should be playing on the same standard of surface.

“That is what we aspire to. Do, we get it right all the time? Probably not, but that’s our goal,” explained Craig.

The school, in the village of Street, was founded in 1935, a mere stripling alongside some of the country’s public schools but in those 88 years its sporting claims to fame has been unmatched. Where else, for example, could boast of having been represented at every Olympic Games since 1956.

Indeed, at the Rio Games in 2016, eight Millfieldians took part and won a total of four medals, in rowing, swimming and rugby sevens. Go back to the London Games in 2012 and Millfield was the most represented UK school.

There are 130 sports coaches on staff who oversee 24 diff erent sports including, in alphabetical order, athletics, badminton, basketball, chess, clay shooting, cricket, cross country, dance, equestrian, fencing, football, golf, hockey, karate, modern pentathlon, netball, rowing, rugby, skiing racing, squash, swimming tennis, trampolining and triathlon.

There is one word for that stable of sporting opportunity – WOW! Facilities include, a 50 metre swimming pool, the equestrian centre, sports halls, cricket nets, putting green, squash courts, water based hockey pitch, outdoor tennis courts, netball courts and a nine-hole golf course.

Definitely spoiled for choice! And it’s not just in sport which Millfield has produced the goods.

The world of entertainment can look to the school for producing some if its biggest stars – Lily Allen, Tony Blackburn, Sophie Dahl, and Rose Leslie, among a host of others, saw the firm foundations of their careers built at Millfield. The current Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace, is a former pupil.

“There are so many talented people at the school and it is good to be in and around it,” said Craig, who recently watch the school’s long jump record being broken by one of the girls.

Despite having risen to the top echelons of grounds management Craig was actually a late starter. He spent the early part of his adult life in the casino business, where he worked around the world before a yearning for a career which would expose him to a little more sunlight.

“I was playing a lot of golf between contracts, and saw the opportunity to do something different with my life,” he recalled.

He approached a local college and they found him a work placement at Woodspring Golf Club, in Bristol, where he was lucky enough to fi nd Course Manager, Steve Chappell, there to mentor him. Steve went on to be Head Greenkeeper at Gleneagles for the Ryder Cup in 2014 and is now a Course Manager in Slovenia.

Potential unleashed

“He was great to work for and we had a young team which produced some very good surfaces.”

Having cut his teeth on golf he then moved to Ashton Gate, home of Bristol City Football Club, where he spent 15 years.

“I remember I started two days after 9/11 in 2001 working under Martin Plumley, who was Grounds Manager. When he moved on a year later I took on the Head Groundsman’s job. At that time we just had the stadium to look after, but I then took on the responsibility for the training pitches at Clifton College.

“We then build a training ground next door and helped level an area for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital School to enable them to create more sports fields before taking on a management contract from the school to look after the facilities.”

Towards the end of his time with Bristol City he had taken on the role of Head of Operations.

“It was amazing really. We were developing three stands at the ground and it was very exciting to be involved with the club. But then the job at Millfield came up. I had a great job at Bristol City and it took a lot to get me to move but with everything the school had to offer it was too great an opportunity to miss.”

As everyone knows, the trick is when starting a new job is to make a good impression early and Craig knew what he wanted to do. Using renovation techniques he’d learned at Bristol City from people including Premier Pitches he introduced new practices which had an immediate impact on the school’s playing surfaces.

“I was lucky that there was a good budget in place and we were able to buy a fraise mower, a disc seeder and a top dresser while we already had a fl eet of tractors and the manpower to carry out the work that I wanted to do. The pitches had never been fraise mown before, but it was something that I knew would bring about significant improvement.

“We also installed drainage and irrigation into a number of pitches and we now take the top off every pitch every year and top dress.

We’ve fraise mown the cricket square for the last three or four years and this year is probably the best we have had them.

“It has allowed us to do our renovations in-house and so we have been able to improve our surfaces and protect the investment that has gone into the pitches.

“Hopefully the school appreciates that and the children can appreciate what they have here when they go to other venues which perhaps don’t drain as well and perform a little bit differently.”

Standards across industry are rising all the time and expectation levels rise accordingly, but any pressure to clear the bar at a school which demands the highest standards is handled with a degree of sensible.

“I don’t think the pressure weighs on us. You can only do what you can do. We are limited with the soils that we have, the drainage that we have, the irrigation that we have and the finances that we have.

“We are not a premier league football club which can spend a lot of money on fertilisers and the latest technology etc, but seeing what can be achieved does give us something to shoot at – we should be trying to improve ourselves and improve the surfaces that we have to look after.”

It would take a very experienced eye to blind test successfully any Millfield pitch against the pitch of a professional team in a range of sports, so Craig and his talented team of groundsmen and gardeners are an extremely good fit for a school where striving for excellence is a non-negotiable.

For me I left the school still regretting that I hadn’t been fortunate enough to have attended but just wondering how many more pupils they would attract if they offered quidditch on the curriculum?

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COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

Potential unleashed

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

Potential unleashed

Full Sized Blog Element (Big Preview Pic)

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens

COMPO is top of the range for bowls greens: Ian Dickson, a bowling green contractor, believes that COMPO EXPERT products have proved to be top of range without the premium price tag.

Potential unleashed

Potential unleashed: Millfield School has an enviable roll call of high achieving alumni. Scott MacCallum speaks with Craig Richardson, Head of Grounds and Gardens, to find out how they do it.

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