Tag Archive for: Evolution

Dennis Signals Eco-Conscious Evolution at Murrayfield

Dennis Signals Eco-Conscious Evolution at Murrayfield: With over a decade of experience nurturing the hallowed grounds of the Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium campus (SGM), Jim Dawson has recently embraced a significant change: the adoption of electric turf maintenance equipment, specifically the Dennis ES-860 cylinder mower, marking a shift away from traditional petrol-powered machinery.

Reflecting on his time at the iconic stadium, Head Groundsman Jim says: “I’ve been working here for 13 years now. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time and it’s a great experience to be part of the national team.” Over the years, Jim has witnessed pivotal transformations in pitch maintenance, notably the transition to a hybrid pitch, a decision made a decade ago to combat nematode issues that plagued the turf. “This new pitch was an absolute game-changer,” he adds.

Dennis Signals Eco-Conscious Evolution at Murrayfield

Dennis Signals Eco-Conscious Evolution at Murrayfield

The introduction of the Dennis ES-860 mowers represents a milestone in Murrayfield’s sustainability journey. Jim, a long-time advocate of Dennis Mowers, explains the rationale behind the switch: “Petrol costs have gone up, and there are obviously the environmental aspects to consider – we had to weigh up the pros and cons of going down the electric route.” After thorough demonstrations and evaluations, the ES-860’s robust features, including extended battery life and compatibility with existing G860 mower cassettes, emerged as compelling factors for Jim.

The Dennis ES-860, a 34″ battery-powered turf

management system, epitomises versatility and efficiency. Offering a range of 13 interchangeable cassette options for tasks such as cutting, scarifying, brushing, and verticutting, it ensures optimal performance for day-to-day maintenance needs. Powered by a 48V battery, the ES-860 boasts a quick 120-minute recharge time, eliminating concerns of range anxiety during prolonged use.

Jim highlights the integration of the ES-860 into Murrayfield’s operations: “The battery life is great – we can get the whole pitch cut on a single charge with no problem at all.” Leveraging the versatility of the machine, Jim utilises various cassettes tailored to specific maintenance requirements. “Predominantly we use the cylinders for cutting,” he explains. “The brush cassettes come in handy during the winter to remove debris from the pitch to keep it clean and we’ve also got the verticutting cassette.”

One of the standout features of the ES-860 is its ultra-quiet operation, a big advantage for Murrayfield’s busy matchday preparations. Jim notes, “Because we have a lot of press and media still working and ‘on air’ a couple of hours after the full time whistle, they are always asking for us to turn the petrol mowers off! However, we can now carry on working with the ES-860’s, because they are so quiet in operation.” This not only enhances efficiency but also creates a more favourable working environment for the groundskeeping team. “I love how quiet the machines are – we can talk over them, and we don’t find ourselves shouting from one end of the pitch to another,” adds Jim.

Dennis Signals Eco-Conscious Evolution at Murrayfield

Dennis Signals Eco-Conscious Evolution at Murrayfield

Moreover, Jim commends Dennis Mowers for their exceptional service and expertise, particularly highlighting Ewen Wilson, Sales Manager for Scotland. “I receive an outstanding service from Dennis Mowers,” he states. “Ewen has helped me a lot over the years and his knowledge of the equipment is fantastic.”

As Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium continues its sustainability journey, Jim says there will be more electric equipment on the way, affirming, “Battery-power is the way forward.”

With market-leading turf maintenance equipment like the Dennis ES-860, Jim Dawson and his team are certainly ensuring that Scotland’s rugby legacy thrives for generations to come.

For further information or a no obligation demonstration, please contact Dennis 01332 824 777 or visit www.dennisuk.com

For more news, reviews and insightful views, you can follow Dennis on Twitter and Instagram @DennisMowers and like the company’s Facebook page – www.facebook.com/DennisMowersUK. You can also view the latest Dennis videos by visiting www.youtube.com/DennisMowers

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Cooper Pegler CP3 Evolution up for grabs

Cooper Pegler CP3 Evolution up for grabs: Knapsack sprayer specialists Hozelock-Exel celebrates its return to the Saltex grounds management show by giving exhibition visitors the chance to win two of its most popular models.

Hozelock-Exel claims uniquely long experience in manufacturing professional sprayers under its Cooper Pegler and Berthoud brands and is offering one knapsack from each for visitors to take away from the event.

Cooper Pegler CP3 Evolution up for grabs

Cooper Pegler CP3 Evolution up for grabs

A firm favourite worldwide among grounds managers for more than 20 years, the CP3 Evolution is tough, durable and gives operators the spray quality they demand.

With an eye on comfort and safety, the knapsack features an ergonomic carrying system that includes tailored shoulder straps and waist belt designed to work better for longer.

Twin tank handles give operators added dexterity, while the proprietary pump system lengthens lifetime and optimises operational convenience.

Berthoud Vermorel knapsacks straddle the diversity of demand across sport, amenity and landscaping sectors. Like every model in the range, the Pro Comfort 2000 features bespoke waist and chest safety harnesses, ergonomically contoured with sturdy backframe to heighten operator comfort and limit body stresses imposed during spraying.

Like its sister models, the Pro Comfort 2000 is easy to use, service and repair to give groundscare professionals the `best buy` value, while a host of spares and accessories such as spray shields, seal and nozzle kits and multi-nozzle spray booms further extend the knapsack’s flexibility.

“Both models typify product features common to both brands,” says Allan Wainwright, UK National Account Manager, “They are modern, serviceable and robust, delivering the reliable spray pressures vital for operators to apply correctly calibrated treatment liquid dilutions. I look forward to presenting these premium quality knapsacks to the lucky winners during Saltex,”

www.cooper-pegler.com

www.berthoud.fr/en/

Follow Cooper Pegler and Berthoud on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Get involved at www.gmasaltex.co.uk/see-you-at-saltex/

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Evolution Naturelle keeps Ham Manor healthy

Evolution Naturelle keeps Ham Manor healthy: According to the Course Manager at Ham Manor Golf Club, Agrovista Amenity’s Evolution Naturelle fertilisers have been a driving factor in producing healthy, dense turf that recovers quickly.

Paul Brown has been the Course Manager at Ham Manor Golf Club in West Sussex for just over five years. It was the job he always wanted and was therefore delighted to be head hunted for the role while working in his previous job at Canterbury Golf Club.

Evolution Naturelle keeps Ham Manor healthy

Evolution Naturelle keeps Ham Manor healthy

Paul may well have been in greenkeeping for an impressive duration of 38 years but admits that he never stops learning – and believes this has certainly been the case over the past year.

“This period during Covid-19 has taught me a lot about turf management,” he said. “There were products that I thought were essential but actually didn’t have any impact when I removed them from the maintenance programme. We were faced with a limited budget and we had to look for value in money in products. Evolution Naturelle is one of those products – it is tried and tested, and we have faith in it.”

The process in which Paul decides on which products to use on the course is rather unique. Whether it is scepticism or the perfectionist in him, Paul always insists on trialling the products somewhat closer to home before applying them to his beloved course.

“If there is a product I haven’t used before, I will more often than not trial it on my own lawn in the garden,” he admitted. “Joe Dormer from Agrovista Amenity gave me some samples of the Evolution Naturelle, and I took them home with me. Boy, did it grow! It was the most amazing lawn anyone could ever have and after that I trialled it on the tees at the course. It worked so well that we rolled it out everywhere – tees, aprons, collars, greens, and areas around the bunkers.”

Evolution Naturelle is a premium range of organo-mineral fertilisers designed with a unique mode of action. Poultry based Evolution Naturelle contains essential nutritional elements such as phosphorus (P), potassium (K), magnesium oxide (MgO), sulphur (S) and iron (Fe) which are compounded to the advanced granulation making them available for plant uptake.

In particular Paul relies on Evolution Naturelle’s Sport Spring – which contains three nitrogen sources blended to optimise consistent grass plant response; and Micro Summer – for phased release and a steady growth response throughout the core of the growing season.

Evolution Naturelle keeps Ham Manor healthy

Evolution Naturelle keeps Ham Manor healthy

“They really are our go-to products,” said Paul. “We apply them throughout the season as a base feed and then will liquid feed or foliar feed on top. There are only two or three months where we can’t use them due to the soil temperatures being a bit low, but generally we are able to apply them most of the year. One of the benefits to using them is that we can use them on a wide variety of areas.”

Further benefits of the Evolution Naturelle range include:

  • Low carbon to nitrogen ratio
  • Provides healthy balanced growth due to phased release of nutrients
  • Complexed potassium for slow release
  • Promotes stimulation of bacterial soil life helping reduce thatch build
  • Hardens turf due to cell division and cell extension as a result of ammonium take up
  • No scorch risk due to low salt index when applied at the correct rates
  • Increased tillering for a denser sward
  • Ammonium produces large volumes of root hairs which ensure active up take of micronutrients

“They really are phenomenal,” continued Paul. “The Evolution Naturelle products have been a big driving factor in producing dense, healthy turf that is resistant to divot damage and recovers quickly from environmental factors such as Leatherjacket activity.

“We find that they provide a decent amount of growth without that huge push and they feed consistently for us. They are also a lot gentler than many similar products we have used in the past which is great because over the past few years my focus has been on encouraging soil health. When I started working here, the organic matter was 28% in the top 60mm and now we are around 3.5% and part of that, apart from all the cultural activities and thatch eating products, is the fact we have stayed clear of harsh products. Evolution Naturelle has been part of that process.

“I’d like to thank Joe Dormer for recommending the products,” added Paul. “Being a former greenkeeper, he is very knowledgeable and now he has an incredible range of products in his portfolio. There is a lot of mutual respect between us and I think there are times where we both learn from each other.”

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

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SuDS – its inevitable evolution

SuDS – its inevitable evolution: This article looks at SuDS direction of travel. Teeth sharpening stuff and it will bite and bite hard, because it must.

SuDS direction of travel

Whilst many in the construction industry focus on return on capital, the market they seek customers from is conducting completely different calculations. The market is interested in bio-diversity, carbon, climate change, contaminants, drought, ecology, environment, flood, plastics, pollutants et al. Money associated to these concerns used to be termed the ‘Green Pound’, stereotyped around middle aged, woolly jumpered tree huggers. Not now. The ‘Green Pound’ is now just the pound in your pocket, nature has gone mainstream. We are becoming a nation of environmentally aware conscious consumers driven by the younger classes who have awoken to the damaging cumulative effect of years of poor government and planning policy

SuDS - its inevitable evolution

SuDS – its inevitable evolution

The world that construction sits in is undergoing a seismic shift. And drainage is one issue at the heart of this.

Flooding is bad for us – welcome to the blame culture

Flooding might make spectacular TV but it is a disaster for people affected. When you attend a flood site and see the aftermath, it’s not great viewing at all. Homeowners with front gardens piled up with their carpets, cupboards, kitchens, sofas, TVs – not fun at all. Worse still is that more and more houses are being affected by flooding.

Then there is the less obvious affect of flooding, that’s to be found in the sewage treatment plants of water companies. In an extreme rainfall event, flash floods can soon overrun a treatment plant and the water company has a straight choice – either to block the flow of water coming in or open the flow for water and sewage to move out downstream. Blocking the incoming flow results in foul and stormwater backing up and homeowners toilets filling with raw sewage and so it is always the downstream option that wins out. However, the COVID lockdown resulted in many people turning to rivers to swim in and then they discovered that there were some real nasties floating around.

Flooded houses and businesses, raw sewage floating in our rivers: someone has to be blamed. In short order the blame will normally fall on the Environment Agency, the Local Authority or the water company. They will in turn blame the institution that has no voice, nature who after all is where climate change comes from. But even that argument is unravelling fast, as greater focus looks at failed drainage designs that allow for mass storm water run-offs from the built environment.

Drought is even worse for us

If you had a choice of too much water or no water, what would you choose?

Whilst the UK has a surplus of water compared to demand, demand is growing in line with population growth and the UK will soon run a water deficit. Combine that with an extreme drought event and then we will be in a proper mess. Some of our streams and rivers, gone. Their eco-system destroyed. Water plants, gone. Water insects, gone. Fish, gone. Birds, gone. All gone and maybe never to recover.

SuDS to the rescue – helping deal with drought and flood

SuDS is about allowing rain to fall pretty much as it always has on the land. The rain infiltrates and percolates its merry way to aquifers and water courses that are vital to sustain our eco-systems. Mankind, however, has had different ideas. Through drainage design we became used to capturing all that rain into one place, stick it in a big pipe, chuck it into a sewer or watercourse and then wish it “bon voyage” as it travels ultimately out to sea and is lost forever.

SuDS drainage looks for ‘at source’ solutions, allowing storm water more time to find its way to aquifers and water courses that it has supported for millennia, helping prevent run-off and flooding. It naturally recharges aquifers and water courses, supporting drought resilience of eco-systems.

Construction versus the Great & the Good

The big guns are now ganging up to force climate and nature into the construction industry. It’s no longer the well-known names banging the environmental drum: Attenborough, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Greta and Prince Charles have now been joined by the United Nations, International Governments, UKGov, Devolved Assemblies, Local Authorities and the uber-wealthy, such as Bill Gates. They all say enough is enough. Protecting the natural world and seeing ourselves as part of it is now mainstream politics and it’s looking for action and change, root and branch. Drainage means water and water means sustainable environments.

SuDS – will bite soon

The built environment has an unfortunate track record. It has too often ignored natures claims and allowed profit to dominate. It won’t be long before the environmental impact of drainage design for any development will be measured by a new yardstick. This will be for any developer to conclusively prove ecological sustainability for drainage or face automatic planning refusal. If that happens then SuDS will have made a huge impact and the sooner it does so, the better.

About our SuDS 2021 campaign

This takes the form of a series of emails, setting out how we see the market positioning of SuDS, its future, its efficacy, how we use it to improve economic value of construction sites and consumer behavioural dynamics that it can harness to change its future.

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Evolution is the solution

Evolution is the solution: Graham Kitley, head of grounds at Hazlegrove Preparatory School in Somerset, needed a premium controlled release fertiliser with no excessive flushes of growth. He found exactly what he was looking for in Agrovista Amenity’s Evolution Controlled Fine 25-5-10

The vastly experienced Graham, along with two other members of staff, tends to approximately twenty-two acres of gardens and grounds at the prestigious Hazlegrove Preparatory School. This includes the maintenance of a six-hole golf course, a putting green, four cricket squares, two synthetic turf pitches, cricket nets and five rugby pitches.

Evolution is the solution

Evolution is the solution

Sport is an integral part of the experience at Hazlegrove and Graham, quite rightly, takes great pride in his work. “I insist on preparing every pitch to a standard that I would like to and expect to play on myself,” he says.

Graham demands the best out of his products and equipment, and therefore, when he felt he wasn’t getting the desired results out of a particular product he knew it was time to look elsewhere.

“I was previously using another fertiliser on our rugby pitches, but I was finding that it was giving me a really bad flush of early growth and I couldn’t keep up with cutting them – it got out of control. I then tried out another couple of different products and none of them really worked for me. It was as this point that I consulted with David Bevan from Agrovista Amenity.”

After David visited Graham and assessed the situation and the pitches, he recommended Agrovista Amenity’s Evolution Controlled Fine 25-5-10 (3-4 months).

Evolution Controlled is a fertiliser range consisting of nutrients packaged in a coated granule that are released over an extended period of time. Longevity is determined by the thickness of the granule coating and by soil temperature. High temperatures accelerate nutrient release, while lower temperatures reduce the process. Evolution Controlled products are therefore very effective in supplying nutrients to the grass relative to current growth requirements.

The Evolution Controlled Fine analysis provides a triple action nitrogen source to promote growth in a range of conditions and the immediate availability of nitrate ensures a rapid response. Polymer coated urea controls further release and ensures the grass continues to receive nitrogen over an extended period, which is exactly what Graham was looking for.

Furthermore, the product boasts significant calcium and magnesium content to support turf health and colour.

Graham took David’s advice on-board and he first applied Evolution Controlled Fine to two of the five rugby pitches. However, he admitted to keeping his options open and wanted to make sure he had the right product before applying it to all five.

“First, we applied Evolution Controlled Fine to two of our rugby pitches in August, but it wasn’t until a bit later that we carried it over to the other three,” he said. “The reason for doing so was because I was conducting a trial with a competitor product. I quickly found that it didn’t work as well as Evolution Controlled. Based on the results, Evolution Controlled is now on all five rugby pitches.

“I cannot fault it at all,” continued Graham. “It has nearly been four months and I still have good colour, plenty of growth and the turf is really healthy. It just continues to tick along nicely and most importantly it hasn’t given me that excessive growth. It is also cheaper than the previous product I was using, which is also another huge bonus.

“It has done exactly what David said it would do. The all-round customer service from Agrovista Amenity has been fantastic throughout the process. What I particularly like about David is that I get the impression he is not just trying to sell me the most expensive products – he genuinely has an interest in your grounds and he works hard to identify the products that will benefit you the most.”

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

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