Grade-A results for cricket wickets at Sevenoaks School
The cricket pitches at Sevenoaks School in Kent have achieved top marks thanks to the use of an ultra-fine perennial ryegrass overseeding mixture which helps the School’s three cricket squares to sustain a busy summer of fixtures.
In addition to over 100 acres of lawns, gardens, an athletics track and a host of rugby, football and hockey pitches, Head of Grounds and Gardens, Simon Willems, and his team of four ground staff and gardeners also look after a dedicated cricket ground consisting of three separate squares, each with 8, 10 and 12 wickets respectively.
With a season that starts as early as mid-April, and an extensive fixture card consisting of 1st XI T20 and all day matches as well as U13, U14 and U15 inter-school and Kent Cup games, summer cricket festivals and Kent Cricket Development Trust training camps, Simon and his team have developed an efficient system to ensure all home matches are contested on well-prepared, hard-wearing wickets.
“Like the majority of schools, the secret to ensuring our cricket wickets are able to withstand the following year’s substantial schedule of fixtures is to use the previous summer break to carry out a full programme of renovation and repair works,” Simon explains.
“In an ideal world, we’d have the entire 8-week summer holiday to focus on renovating the wickets, but, with an increasing number of community and non-school cricketing events taking place on our pitches in July and August, we rarely get more than a few uninterrupted weeks to rejuvenate the cricket squares.”
Simon and his team therefore focus their wicket renovation efforts during the first half of August when they follow a proven regime of scarifying, top-dressing, over-seeding, irrigation and fertiliser application to repair the worn wickets and to establish new grass growth.
“We use a Graden scarifier and solid tine Aera-Vator to prepare the wickets for re-seeding, before hand-sowing Germinal’s A5 perennial ryegrass mixture at 50g/m2,” Simon continues. “We renovate all three squares at the same time, using overhead sprinklers as and when necessary to ensure the new seed establishes and grows away as quickly as possible.”
Simon’s choice of grass seed is based on a detailed comparison of the varieties on the STRI’s Table L1: “Pound for pound, the two cultivars that make up Germinal’s A5 Cricket, Tennis and Tees mixture are the best one’s available for our purposes.
“Escapade provides good all-round performance in terms of shoot density, tolerance to low cutting, and disease resistance, while Cabrio takes things to the next level in terms of fineness of leaf and colour. Together they tick all the right boxes and have proven to perform brilliantly for us in terms of speed of establish and their ability to cope with heavy workloads.”
Mowing the newly established sward starts in September, with the first rotary cut set at one inch: “We continue to use the rotary mower throughout the winter, switching to our cylinder mowers and a 0.5-inch cut height from February onwards,” Simon adds. “As we get closer to the start of the season, we’ll do some light scarifying to keep surface matter under control and start rolling as soon as conditions allow.”
With fixtures and practice sessions held nearly every day during the summer term, the squares are mown on a daily basis and are subject to a huge amount of wear and tear. To mitigate the damage caused, and to ensure there’s always a good surface to play on, alternate wickets are used throughout the season, with each square’s odd numbered wickets used for the first half of the season, before switching to even numbers for the remainder of the fixture list. On each square the first and last wickets are reserved solely for practice sessions.
“The quality of our greens is largely the result of the hard work of our principal cricket groundsman, Niall Watson,” Simon continues. “As well as managing each square’s workload and preparing each successive wicket, he also carries out in-season repairs as and when each wicket has been signed off for the season. Any scars or damaged areas are filled with a loam and seed mixture which Niall prepares 48 hours in advance to give the germination process a head start.”
The overseeding regime is supported by a simple nutrition programme which uses just two products – a granular fertiliser and a liquid feed – to provide all the necessary soil nutrients.
“We use a Vicon pendulum spreader to make four applications of a slow release Novatec granular fertiliser between Easter and Christmas and top up with Germinal’s seaweed enriched GL3 liquid fertiliser throughout the year to maintain a healthy population of beneficial soil bacteria.
“Using just two products makes it easier for everyone involved as there’s less paperwork and invoicing to process, less time spent changing spreader settings and less scope for error. And because we’re using quality, long-lasting products which don’t scorch or leach easily, we don’t have to worry quite so much when conditions become too dry or wet,” Simon concludes.