Weeders as Leaders By Jeff McManus
“If you truly want to pursue and achieve the success you were created for, you must recognize the role of vision, the significance of dreams and the power of actions without which you are just making a living.” -Israelmore Ayivor
in to our philosophy of being the best of the best in campus grounds. My biggest frustration was the lack of quality sod that represented our standards. Te sod was full of weeds, fell apart and there was a real lack of pride in the contractors who installed it. No matter how much I complained, the grower attempted to justify the sloppiness with excuses. How could we achieve our vision working with suppliers who had no vision? Te quality of the turfgrass matters, especially in a common area on a college campus. When properly installed and maintained the turfgrass will give you that feeling of security and peace.
Jeff McManus, with pruning shears in hand, admires the beautiful azaleas in bloom on the Ole Miss campus.
After each home football season, Ole Miss re-sods most of the center of campus lawns—up to 7000 square yards annually. Tese lawns provide a beautiful place for students, faculty, staff, visiting alumni, prospective students, and community friends to relax and enjoy the outdoors. Te care and attention to detail we provide in landscape services, coupled with finding and maintaining relationships with vendors and University administrators who share our vision and work ethic, is important. Te result is what we call our 5 National Championships in Campus Beautification. Te challenges were many and the road has been lengthy. In fact, we are still traveling it—like everyone else—just like you. Striving for the best, developing a vision for greatness, is best achieved by a team effort.
The Challenge When we started our beautification project on campus in 2000, several years before we hammered out the Landscape Creed, we worked hard to get our staff to buy
14
Tankfully, after much research, we found and hired sod growers and installers who cared about what they did as much as we cared. We found sod installers who didn’t overlap the sod onto the other sod, but correctly butted it up, edge to edge, thus saving us lots of time in correcting the work. How refreshing it was the day the weed free, freshly cut sod rolled onto campus! Having suppliers
who shared our values of quality work and precise detail made our campus popular for eye-appeal.
Each home football game the Grove is home to one of the best tailgating experiences in the world. Te stately large canopy trees and luscious green grass provide a perfect environment for great memories and, for many, contribute to a bucket list experience. Regularly, the 10-acre Grove and campus hosts as many as 100,000 people—that’s a lot of foot traffic for 7,000 yards of sod, plants and trees. Back-to-back football games provide challenges.
Regularly, our team maintaining the Grove faces as much as 97 tons of waste and recyclables at 1:00 a.m. on those Sunday mornings following a game. Te day before, the manicured turfgrass was an incredible venue for memories, community and good times, but 24-hours later it looks like a landfill. Te grass was usually gone by the third game of the season. Te feeling of losing your masterpiece
TPI Turf News March/April 2019
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
