Replenish the Soil for Spring

As the temperatures start to rise, it’s impossible not to think about the season beginning in cool season climates while transitioning in warm season climates. On sports fields, tarps and covers are getting pulled off pitches and greens, and lawn care companies are starting to fill neighborhoods. After winter feeling like an eternity, it’s the time of year we all look forward to within the green industry!

As we move into the season, it’s important to keep some basic nutritional concepts in mind. If we take a stand of grass and think about it as a painting, it helps to imprint a few of these conceptual images. Let’s assume our stand of grass is a finished painting. We may have the best “Van Gogh” known to man, or it may look like a child had ten minutes with a canvas and a bunch of open paint cans. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, let’s assume your desire is more the “Van Gogh” route!

Imagine we have the opportunity to start with a fresh canvas and paint our own masterpiece. Every spring, we get that opportunity with soils! There are two things to focus on when starting fresh and painting that masterpiece:

1. Flush
2. Replenish

First, it’s better to start fresh. While we may not be able to change the soil we have, we can start fresh with what’s available to the plant. We can start fresh with what nutrients the turf sees by performing a soil “flush.”

Foliar-Pak provides excellent options when it comes to flushing your stand of turf. Per our Soil Flush program, we recommend applying and heavily watering in a combination of 1.5-3 oz/1000 sq. ft. of Command; 6-12 oz/1000 sq. ft. of BioDrive; and 5 lb/1000 sq. ft. of Gypsum. This program does a great job of flushing out all the bad guys, sodium and bicarbonates. The program also helps to eliminate ratio imbalances between desired nutrients.

Flushing the scene is a great practice; however, it also removes the good guys, too,; calcium, magnesium, potassium, minors, etc. This is what starting with a clean canvas means. You’ve taken out the good with the bad, allowing you to start clean. It’s important now to fill that empty canvas with a nutrient masterpiece!

When it comes to replenishing the soil solution and deciding the foliar nutrition, Foliar-Pak has a range of programmatic solutions. There are recurring products within these solutions: Foundation Forty, Amperage, Promote, Minors, Armament P, and Calcium.

Let’s take a quick look at why each of these is beneficial in the spring for replenishing the plant from a foliar and a soil solution perspective.

Foliar-Pak Foundation Forty

This product is a blend of proprietary and highly specific amino acids that aid in chlorophyll production, carbon assimilation, nitrogen assimilation, and building anti-stress osmolytes. All of this equates to the plant producing energy again and getting through times of stress.

Foliar-Pak Amperage

This product provides the plant with available minors that aid in chlorophyll production and photosynthesis. Amperage helps the plant to produce energy during times of slow metabolism, like spring and fall shoulder seasons.  Amperage also has multiple food sources for microbes and has been re-formulated with a hefty dose of amino acids specific to photosynthetic efficiency.

Foliar-Pak Promote

This product has well-rounded carbon to feed the microbial population and help the plant produce anti-stress hormones. It performs foliar and in the soil for maximum versatility. Promote maintains fertility and carbon-buffered balance amidst abiotic plant stressors such as salinity, traffic, and high/low temperature.

Foliar-Pak Minors

Minors provides secondary/micro nutrients to aid in recovery, chlorophyll production, increase density, drive rooting, and increase carbohydrate production.

Foliar-Pak Armament P

Phosphorous is a major player in energy production and protein synthesis for rooting and building new tissue. Phosphorous is the “P” in ATP, one of the major energy sources of plants. Armament P uses the nutrient-protecting technology of Armament to deliver phosphorous in a form that’s completely usable and available to the roots.

Foliar-Pak Calcium

Calcium is essential for cell integrity and driving new roots, as it’s a part of the root cap. Foliar-Pak Calcium has a unique blend of both high and low molecular weight metabolites, delivering available Calcium to both the roots and shoots.

So as we march forward into another season, let’s remember to start with a new soil canvas via “flush” and fill that blank soil canvas with the nutrients plants need.