BULLHEAD CITY – Keeping Bullhead City’s Sports fields in pristine shape for tournaments of more than 100 teams, sometimes requires counterintuitive measures.
“I get a lot of calls this time of year.” said Parks Superintendent David Heath. “They are concerned that the grass is dying, or we are watering too much.”
Heath referred to the confusion he encounters yearly when the city begins to reseed the sports fields. To maintain green grass fields in Bullhead City’s hot summers and cold winters, the Parks Division switches between different breeds of grass each fall and spring. In the summer, the fields present Bermuda grass, a heat, humidity, and salt-tolerant species of grass. Bermuda performs well in Bullhead City summers but goes dormant in the cooler winter. Dormant Bermuda grass turns brown and appears dead.
To keep the fields green during the winter, the Parks division first pushes the Bermuda Grass into an early dormancy by scalping the fields and turning off the irrigation for a few days.
“When we do this, it looks like the grass is dying on all the fields,” Heath said. “That’s exactly what we need to spread the winter seed on the fields.”
The Parks Division seeds the fields each fall with Rye and Fescue; two cold-tolerant grass breeds with different shade resiliency.
“While it looks bad for some time, it’s worth it for how good it will look in the winter and spring during peak tournament season,” Heath said.
Bullhead City Parks Maintenance crews have begun reseeding the City’s sports fields for the fall of 2023. Crews have scalped and reseeded the east and west soccer fields at Rotary Park and began reseeding the baseball tri-plex at Rotary Park Thursday, September 21. Sports fields across the city will temporarily close on a rotational basis while winter seeds take root. Visitors to the park may notice crews mowing the grass very short, the fields not being watered, or the fields turning yellow-brown in the next few weeks, followed by soft and full green fields of winter grass in the winter and early spring.
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