XGD Sportsfield and Golf Fairway Drainage

I finally got some shots of some sportsfield drainage we completed this past summer at Brunswick School in Greenwich,CT. This nearly finished photo exhibits the soccer/baseball field just before the trenches were seeded and mulched.

In this XGD sportsfield drainage application, Projects Manager Matt Magarian utilized some 4″ mainlines and the balance as you see in the pic includes our regular 2″ XGD Underdrain at 14″ deep minimum, and backfilled with a porous, free draining sand percing around 15″/hour. As the XGD trenches were just 3″ wide the Brunswick School http://www.brunswickshool.org/ elected to let the trenches grass over during the summer time, before the field returned to heavy use after Labor Day.

The same XGD application is used on our golf fairway drainage installations. We can provide estimates with XGD leaving the open trenches(which quickly grass over during a growing season), or we can price it with the option of cutting and replacing sod. Many golf clubs prefer to return the sod, so that golf play can resume immediately without the turf scars you see in the photo. Matt is embarking on of these projects next week in Chicagoland at Butler National GC http://www.butlernational.org/ . Butler has chosen to return the sod over the trench lines and Matt will be getting us some pictures of that project in the upcoming weeks.

Both sportsfield and golf fairway applications are using XGD’s same basic soil drainage philosophies that got us to where we are today:

1) systematic lowering of the high gravitational groundwater table and

2) backfilling with a suitably porous sand for each specific application so as to get surface water through and out of the upper soil profile

For example, we use a backfill material for our greens drainage process that is highly organic and percing around 3″/hour so theses trenches hold enough moisture during the heat of summer. While golf fairway drainage installations XGD will use something in the 7″-10″/hour range and sportsfields installs we use a very porous sand above 10″/hour as the visibility of the sand slits is usually not an issue with bluegrass sportsfields.

So please give us a shout if we might be able to stop by your facility and improve the agronomic infrastructure for the long term.

Later, Poor Old Dirt & Grass Farmer