Product Description

Turf and amenity grasslands in their multifarious form, including sport pitches, playing fields, golf courses, lawns, motorway embankments, roadside verges, urban parks and open spaces, have a significant impact on our everyday lives. Each year central government, local authorities, sports clubs and other organizations spend large sums of money establishing, maintaining and managing such grasslands. It is essential that all these bodies meet proper standards of provision and manage their grassland efficiently and in an environmentally friendly and cost-effective way. This book will help them to achieve these objectives. Topics covered: grasses and their uses; all aspects of mowing, including the effects on the grass plant and the machines that are available; irrigation; nutrition and fertilizer application; aeration, thatch control and top-dressing; pests, diseases and weeds; turf establishment and renovation; species-rich swards.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83674 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-16
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Stewart Brown is a Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Landscape Management at Writtle College, Essex where he teaches agronomic sports-turf and amenity-landscape to undergraduates. He has over twenty-five years' experience of sports-turf and amenity-horticulture industries. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Groundsmanship.

Customer Reviews

a very useful book
As a keen gardener with a lawn I found this well written book filled a gap between very expensive reference texts and books such as "The Lawn Expert", although it is closer in quality to the reference. So although it has been written with turf specialists in mind it deserves to find a wider audience in the general public. There is clearly a balance for the professional to strike in fertilizer use with either semi-raw chemicals, which are cheap, or a synthetic branded type which may be expensive but has the merit of slow release and good performance, which is discussed in the chapter on fertilizers. For a single garden the synthetic route is much easier but it does cost. For those of organic bent the merit of leaving clippings back on the grass is discussed as it will certainly reduce fertilizer use.
Since companies now offer lawn care with scarifiers and aerators it is as well to know what and why they are doing to your lawn if you should decide to hire such a company and this book answers that. It is also very useful in descriptions of machinery used which we see both in the garden and also on a larger scale for sports turf management, so I recommend it for students as well. I am keeping back one star because in the slightly over concise opening chapter on grasses a labelled magnified set of photos to specifically apply to the "Quick Key to Turfgrass" to help in Taxonomy and identification would have been the icing on the cake.