Now It’s Over To The Weather
After a full week of digging, shovelling, seeding and spreading – the Greenhous Meadow pitch is now waiting on some good weather before being ready for Cardiff City on July 18th.Dave Saltman, Managing Director of Maxwell Amenity Limited, has overseen the work done at GM and is now hopeful that an improvement on the weather will see the pitch ready for the start of pre-season.
“The renovations gone well,” says Dave. “We’ve turned the main stadium pitch over and added a load of ingredients such as fertilisers and additives to help it along. Once it was re-graded we seeded it so it’s now put to bed. The rain is very welcome but the core temperatures aren’t. We are three days away from the start of summer now and we haven’t really had a spring flush of growth yet.”
Dave’s company have entered into a two-year contract with the club to maintain all of the grass surfaces which starts with the renovation of all the pitches (Greenhous Meadow and training ground) and Dave believes the new treatment of the playing surface is long overdue.
“There hasn’t been a lot of resource spent on the pitch over the last couple of years,” added Dave. “The grass type was weed grass which has a very shallow rooting which causes a lot of problems through the winter with stability, which I think most people were aware of. We’ve stripped all of that out and we’ve now replanted it with a quality ryegrass.”
You would be hard pressed to see any evidence of a football pitch at the moment but Dave is confident that come the first friendly of the season, the pitch will be ready.
“It depends on the weather,” says Dave, when asked about when we can expect to see something that resembles that of a football pitch. “Normally this time of year we would expect to be doing our first cut in about two and a half weeks time so fingers crossed the weather and temperatures will improve and the grass will come up quickly.
“I’m confident the grass will come through (before the first friendly) even if it’s a bit late.
“I think we’ve got at least a couple of friendlies at the start of the season and the first game will be at home because of the Flower Show, so we’ve got quite an intensive start but given what we’ve done to the pitch, I’m pretty confident it will bode well.”
But Dave believes the effort and resources gone into the football pitch this pre-season will ensure the club have the foundations to maintain an excellent playing surface for seasons to come.
“You can spend a lot of money on a pitch but its natural and growing all of the time and if you don’t look after it then it goes back very quickly.
Hopefully now we will be able to give it the time, effort and resource to keep it in good condition so this time next year we won’t be doing the sort of work we’ve had to do this year.”