SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/107950
FieldScience >> THIS IS OUR BREWING SET-UP with the air compressor in the middle of the four containers and PVC piping branching off of that. Insect Control: Worm castings are rich in chitinase, a chemical that decomposes the exoskeleton of insects. Many researchers believe that its presence in the castings prove inhibitory to many damage-causing insects. Plant Available Nutrients: Worm castings provide soluble nutrients to the plant. The nutritional analysis can vary depending on the food source during the vermicomposting process, but generally the castings have around 1-3% N, .5-1% P, and 1-2% K. These levels are low, but they are immediately ready for plant uptake. >> CLOSE-UP view of the dry worm castings. APPLICATION PROCESS Worm castings can be applied a couple of different ways. Like any compost, the castings can be spread in a finely ground, dry formulation. Dry application would be more useful in a situation when it could be 30 SportsTurf | February 2013 added directly to the soil profile during a renovation or construction. When applied to the plant, the best and most cost effective application method is by making a tea from the castings. Much like making a pot of tea at home, the concept of this tea is to simply use water to extract all of the "good stuff " from the worm castings into a liquid solution that can easily be applied. This process can be done two different ways: extracted or aerobically brewed. Aerobically brewed teas require more time to produce, but the end product is a solution with exponentially higher microbial populations than that of extracted teas. This aerobic tea brewing process is fairly simple, but it does require some time, attention, and know how. A variety of brewing containers and methods are available and can be used; however, a key point to keep in mind when producing the castings tea is that because the tea is a living solution, oxygen and a food source must be continually available to the microorganisms in the tea for survival and maximum population growth. During the STMA Conference last year in Long Beach, CA I sat in on an educational program presented by Leif Dickinson about his practices with growth regulators on his bermudagrass at Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. During the presentation he mentioned his use of worm castings tea brewed with alfalfa to jump start his turf out of large patch symptoms in the spring time. Our field had experienced large patch the previous fall, so this concept caught my attention. I began looking for any additional information or research anywhere about the benefits or drawbacks from the usage of worm castings tea on turfgrass. What I found was a wealth of success stories from gardeners, crop producers, and the greenhouse production industry, but nothing more documenting real success on turfgrass. After reading all of the different uses and benefits, I came to the realization that once you strip everything down, growing quality turfgrass isn't really that much different from growing other crops, so I decided to give brewing an aerobic castings tea a try. For the brewing system I retrofitted an air bubbling system off of a 10-gallon air compressor we had sitting around. We began spraying in mid-March as our bermudagrass had begun coming out of dormancy. My intention was to make three applications on 2-week intervals with my last application coming in mid-April; instead I got hooked on the results we were having and continued spraying on the bimonthly interval schedule for the remainder of the growing season. OBSERVATIONS FROM TRIAL AND ERROR APPROACH • Because our field displayed the visual symptoms of large patch in the fall, I naturally anticipated those same areas to appear as the field broke dormancy in the spring. When the turf woke up from the winter, the infected areas from the previous fall where nowhere to be found. • I was amazed how well the "usual suspect" wear areas handled traffic throughout the year. Even before the bermudagrass season really kicks into gear, the turf dealt with our 18 high school game, pre-Lookouts season slate with ease. From my observation, this improved wear tolerance continued throughout the 2012 season. • Even though we had a substantially drier summer, two different observations I made this year can speak to improved water retention in our soil. First, we did not have an occurrence of fairy ring, which the field had experienced the previous six seasons. www.sportsturfonline.com