Old Main Hill is green again, if a little weedy

Despite mistakenly killing the grass on Old Main hill in October, Utah State University’s facilities department has managed to make the hill green once more.

Shane Richards, Landscape Operations and Maintenance manager, said the grass is 60 percent grown in and by the end of the month should be 100 percent grown. He said the speedy recovery of the foliage on Old Main Hill is possible due to a combination of aeration and germination.

“Germination is getting the seeds to crack open and the roots to come up … for Kentucky Bluegrass (it takes) about 21 days for that germination to begin,” Richards said.

According to the National Gardening Association, aeration is the process of punching holes in the lawn to enable roots to breathe and receive more water and nutrients.

Though Richards says the process of aeration and germination to regrow the grass is one any knowledgeable agricultural company would do, getting the grass to grow back as quickly as it did while saving money wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the professors at USU.

“The professors at USU are very skilled, so we love to collaborate with them,” Richards said.

With a combined effort of USU Facilities and professors, the cost of repairing the damage was $1200.

While the grass continues to grow, facilities is facing another problem as many weeds also begin to grow.

“The reason we have weeds now is because the grass is so thin … the Kentucky Bluegrass will actually kill most weeds by taking all the nutrients and water that is in the soil anything that is left we can kill,” Richards said.

Once the weeds are taken care of, facilities plans to continue its usual turf care routine, but is looking into possibly adding a new twist.

Richards said facilities has been working dining services for almost a year to create a compost for many of the campus trees and flowerbeds, but Richards would like to expand that to include fertilization for the lawns as well.

“I would like to get a machine that could break down the compost into a finer soil, so we can use it for the lawns,” Richards said.

Fertilizer is just the beginning of USU Facilities’ plan to become more eco-friendly as it continues to develop more ways to save water and introduce new plants to the campus.

“We love the outdoors and want to protect it,” Richards says. “That’s why we do the job we do.”

-shaniehoward214@gmail.com