Spring is definitely upon us, with a glorious display of spring flowers everywhere you look. Cherry blossoms, crocus, forsythia and muscari, with daffodils taking centre stage. Hedgerows are also now coming into leaf.
With soil and air temperatures into double figures, these favourable temperatures will promote some much-needed grass growth. April is a good time to carry out any relevant spring renovation work to your lawns.
This usually sees an application of moss killer, a light scarification of the lawn in two / three directions to remove any dead moss and clean out the base of the grass plant to be able to re-populate the lawn with some new grass seed. Also, if required you could aerate the lawn and finish off with applying a granular spring 9.7.7 NPK ratio or similar fertiliser product. within a couple of weeks, you should start to see a vast improvement to the appearance of your lawn.
Green Flag update
I was also recently given notice of the start of the GreenFlag awards programme where judges like myself are given a list of parks and public open spaces to assess. Each year I, along with some 400 other experts, are enlisted to help judge over 2000 parks and public open spaces in the UK.
The Green Flag Award scheme recognises and rewards well managed parks and green spaces, setting the benchmark standard for the management of recreational outdoor spaces across the United Kingdom and around the world.
The purpose and aim of the scheme is to ensure that everybody has access to quality green and other open spaces, irrespective of where they live and ensure that these spaces are appropriately managed and meet the needs of the communities that they serve.
I have been judging parks for well over ten years now and find it rewarding to see that in light of all the government cutbacks, many local authorities are still trying to deliver decent standards of maintenance and retain the many skills required to look after these diverse public spaces.
The Green Flag awards started in 1997, when the green space sector in the United Kingdom was in a parlous state. Decades of underfunding had left many once proud and beautiful historic city centre parks derelict, dangerous, no-go areas, and many other green spaces were neglected or barely maintained.
Experts with a shared interest in promoting natural spaces from a range of backgrounds came together in response to this decline. The scheme was directed by a steering group made up of individuals and representatives of larger organisations, led by Mark Davis of the Pesticides Action Network UK.
Their intention was to establish agreed standards of good management, to help to justify and evaluate funding, and to bring people back into the parks. And it worked. As the standard became established, other green spaces began to apply for the Award, and now Green Flags fly over parks, cemeteries and crematoria, recreation grounds, canals, reservoirs, educational campuses, hospital grounds, housing estates, nature reserves and allotments. There is no limit on the size of the site; they currently range from less than one hectare to thousands of hectares.
It is important we can safeguard and promote these public open spaces especially at a time when local authorities are going through a tough budgeting period, especially as several councils have been declaring themselves bankrupt.
I believe you really cannot put a value on these precious green spaces. Let us hope councils up and down the country recognise the value of these assets and find a way of keeping them maintained to a decent standard.
As for me, I will be rather busy over the next few weeks, trialling a number of new outdoor powered tools, kindly supplied by STIHL, EGO and Makita. I have a range of equipment supplied that I shall be putting to the test that includes back pack blowers, multi tools and a scarifyier.
