The Wet Week – Sustaining Healthy Turf

My regular readers will know that my last blog was all about just how dry things have been this year!!!!!!

Well pretty much the moment I published that Blog it started raining and it's only just stopped! Or at least that's how it felt on my travels this week.

My tour of the UK this week under a big cloud!

This week I've been on tour with the ICL team presenting at Turf Science Lite. These are are great set of educational events put on by the ICL team and it's been brilliant to be involved.

Whilst there were some fantastic speakers and really interesting subjects (which I'll try and summarize in this blog over the next few weeks) the main thing I think we need to address here is the colossal amount of rain we received this week which seemed to track me up the country!

weekly rainfall totals
from the EA Website

In areas we did indeed record a typical months worth of rainfall in just a few days. As I reported in my last blog the season to date has been excessively dry and whilst this rainfall probably fell a little quick to be absolutely ideal it was very much needed and will go a long way to relieving the pressure on what had potential to become one of the toughest turf management years I've seen in my 25 year career.

The rainfall we've received coupled with a slight reduction in temperatures should bring us back on track to sustain healthy turf throughout June and into July, the good temperatures and now adequate moisture should also push on some of those areas still struggling from 2018.

I've only recently started tracking river flow rates which with development in some areas will be under increasing pressure over the next few years. This weeks rain has had a significant impact on these flows but with groundwater levels so low it will be interesting to see how long the increased flows persist for.

Just how wet was it? I've had a quick scan and I think the wettest area of the country this week was around Skegness / the Wash where I think they had around 90mm of rain.

This is going to present some agronomic challenges ahead which I'll cover in my next Blog.

Check the local weather in your area on the brilliant weather forecast on the Greencast website - just click here.

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