David Holland – Head groundsman at The Sportsground

Just because there are no games being played at The Sportsground at the moment doesn’t mean the work has stopped for Head groundsman David Holland. With the surface at The Sportsground widely regarded as one of the best in the Magners League we caught up with Dave to find out what he’s been up to recently:

“Well at the moment we’re re-seeding the main pitch, we work with Colin Dunne from Cill Dara Sportsfiled Services as we have done so for the past 7 or so years. They work on the pitch over in Terryland and are regarded as one of the best in the country. There’s a fair bit to it, first we use a disc-seeder which basically slices a 10mm slit in the ground and places grass seed into the hole. The slits are so narrow you’d hardly notice them and they close up immediately sealing the seed in the ground.

We use a top-dresser of Wexford Sand. We use a very specific sand which can only be found in 2 places in Ireland, Lough Neagh and Wexford as the grains have to be a certain size, too big and they sit on top of the soil and too small and they stick together causing all sorts of surface drainage issues. We spread about 7mm across the whole pitch, around 8000sq/m.

Finally we aerate the soil with a solid tine machine and this relieves the compaction of the soil by driving a spike into the ground. This allows water to sink further down through the soil and encourages the grass roots to follow, making it tougher to uproot.

The pitch gets cut at least every other day over the Summer, daily if we get the opportunity and we also fertilise it regularly. Weeds aren’t a major problem here at The Sportsground though we do dose it with weedkiller twice a year.