Great Solutions for Topdressing

July 14, 2020
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Donny Raw
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Top dressing is an important cultivation practice for keeping the turf in excellent condition. It is highly recommended to include it within your annual grassy surface management program. It brings significant benefits. So you can opt for the topdresser Ecolawn for this task.

Why top dressing?

Topdressing operations are performed in order to:

Level the area and make the cutting surface more uniform
Prevent and reduce the formation of the felt increases the mineralization speed of the organic substance
Prevent the formation of water stagnation, improving drainage
Reduce surface humidity, helping to prevent fungal attacks
Favor the development in depth of the root system
Encourage seed germination in seeding

Having clarified its importance expert recommends considering top dressing as an operation to be scheduled and not an emergency.

What does topdressing consist of?

The operation itself consists of applying a light layer of soil, sand and other granular materials on the surface of the lawn. However, one must make sure that one proceeds correctly: errors in the top dressing phase are difficult to remedy. It is therefore necessary to evaluate very well the quality of the material used and the proportion between the various elements. For example, if you exceed with sand, in the long run you will encounter phenomena of excessive drying of the surface and reduction of permeability. A low hydroscopic capacity, in addition to being harmful in itself, can also compromise the action of nitrogen and agrochemicals.

When to intervene?

Top dressing is performed both on sports lawns and private gardens. It is performed mostly in conjunction with vertidrain and caring operations, with turf in full vegetative activity and in the absence of rain.

Before intervening, it is important to cut the lawn at least 2.5 cm and ventilate to remove the felt. In particularly compact soils, scarify the surface. Attention: leave the lawn to rest for at least 48 h, to allow the leaves to resume full photosynthesis capacity.

Which and how much material to use?

The use of screened silica sand or mixed peat sand in the ratio of 85/25 is widely preferred. When it comes to sand but, in general, of all the products that come into contact with the soil, a factor of fundamental importance is the pH.

An element that distinguishes siliceous or river sand is quartz, present in small crystals similar to granite. It is their bright reflection that allows you to recognize silica sand from limestone. The latter creates an increase in the pH of the soil, damaging the lawn and seeds, therefore absolutely to be avoided.

How to distribute the sand?

For large surfaces the operation must be mechanized and performed with equipment such as towed or independent belt sand spreaders that allow a precise and homogeneous distribution of the product. In small surfaces, push spreaders can be used.

When puddles form on the turf, it is clear that the lawn has dipped, has holes, and that it also has some compaction and drainage problems. It is necessary to intervene immediately, not only for aesthetic reasons, but also to prevent the valleys from turning into holes of bare soil.

Top-dressing: how to do it

If the valleys are limited and not very deep i.e. not several meters in diameter, you can proceed with the “reloading” or top-dressing, a simple filling operation to be repeated several times, after two weeks the one from the other, until the surface is completely leveled.