The St. Paul Saints on Jan. 30, 2014, unveiled three new renderings of the regional ballpark in Lowertown, including this view of the Suite Level. (Image courtesy of the St. Paul Saints)

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman will be the first to break in the freshly-laid sod on Wednesday morning when he plays catch at the new regional ballpark in Lowertown.

The $64 million, city-owned CHS Field will be home to the independent league St. Paul Saints and Hamline University's Piper Baseball team when it officially opens off 5th and Broadway in May 2015. Contractors affiliated with the Ryan Companies will begin laying sod on the ball field at 8 a.m. The mayor is expected to take the mound around 11 a.m.

The Saints recently ended their 22-year run at Midway Stadium on Energy Park Drive. The 12-acre site will be converted by the St. Paul Port Authority and United Properties into an office and light manufacturing center. The building, which will measure up to 200,000 square feet, could open in 2016.

More information is online at lowertownballpark.com.

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Lowertown ballpark: CHS Field's grass goes in Wednesday

FIFA officials will be taking a closer look at BC Place today in light of the controversy surrounding turf conditions for the Womens World Cup that will be held in Canada next year.

A total of six stadiums around the country will be inspected.

BC Place will host the World Cup final on July 5 as well as a number of other matches in the group and playoff stages.

At the beginning of this month, a group of elite female players filed a lawsuit against the Canadian Soccer Association and FIFA claiming gender discrimination because their male counterparts have always played on natural grass surfaces.

They say playing on fake grass impacts game dynamics and can result in a greater risk of injury.

The players alsosuggest that tournament venues replace their turf with permanent or temporary grass pitches.

A lawyer representing the players says it would cost $2 million to $3 million at most to install real grass.

So far, FIFA has said it has no plans to reconsider using artificial turf and there is no plan B.

Players say they will not be boycotting the World Cup over this issue.

A number of celebrities weighed in on the debate.

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FIFA officials to inspect BC Place turf in light of controversy

Whats the current state of artificial turf?

One of the main differences between synthetic turf used today and older versions is the use of infill material, which gives the surface far more cushioning and acts as artificial earth, providing more shock absorption and natural footing. That infill is made of materials such as sand and rubber crumbs produced from ground-up recycled tires. Older versions of synthetic turf had shorter piles of synthetic grass blades that were more abrasive to the skin, and used just sand as infill, or none at all. Todays have longer piles made of plastic fibres, which feel softer than in the past.

What is FIFAs standard?

The artificial-turf pitches for the 2015 Womens World Cup must be 2-Star recommended fields, the highest standard within the FIFA Quality Concept for Football Turf. The pitches can only be from one of FIFAs select group of approved manufacturers. All competition and training fields from the six host Canadian cities must be rigorously tested within one year of competition. The physical materials are measured and tested, as well as the fields durability, the reaction of the ball on the surface and the reaction of a player to the surface.

Has natural grass been installed over artificial?

Yes. When the United States hosted the mens 1994 World Cup, FIFA installed real grass on top of the artificial stuff at the Pontiac Silverdome, then the home of the NFLs Detroit Lions. It was the first time World Cup matches would be played indoors. Experts in turf-grass management at Michigan State University spent 18 months trying to figure out how to keep grass alive inside a domed stadium for the month-long tournament, and came up with the worlds first portable natural-turf-grass system: 1,900 hexagonal aluminum trays, each containing about 50 square feet of grass, which would be wheeled in and out. That single-field conversion cost FIFA about $2-million (U.S.).

How could the artificial turf be converted to grass for the womens tournament?

If organizers had to put the tournament on grass, they would either move the games to appropriate grass fields or put temporary natural grass right on top of the artificial-turf surfaces. The cost estimates for conversion vary wildly, but one expert estimated about $600,000 to $700,000 a field. It would likely be done by putting a series of trays of soil on top of the synthetic surface, and then putting thick sod on top.

Why do many soccer players prefer natural grass?

Synthetic surfaces are used for soccer at many levels around the world, as well as field hockey, rugby and NFL and NCAA football. It is used in CFL stadiums five of which are being used for this Womens World Cup (Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver). In fact, many of the women who will play in this World Cup play in small artificial-turf stadiums in the National Womens Soccer League, saying they do what they must to build a foundation for their young league. The ball moves differently on synthetic turf, changing the way the game is played and the abandon with which they play it, many soccer players say. Sliding on it can be more painful than on natural grass and diving headers more risky. On a hot, sunny day, artificial turf heats up, thanks to its black infill and synthetic grass fibres, and watering it only does so much to cool it down.

See more here:
Everything you wanted to know about artificial turf

Anne M. Peterson, The Associated Press Published Wednesday, October 1, 2014 4:03PM EDT Last Updated Wednesday, October 1, 2014 8:20PM EDT

A group of elite players has filed a lawsuit in Canada challenging plans to play the 2015 Women's World Cup on artificial turf.

The players, led by U.S. women's national team forward Abby Wambach, filed Wednesday in the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal in Toronto, lawyer Hampton Dellinger told The Associated Press.

The women claim that playing the sport's premier tournament on fake grass amounts to gender discrimination under Canadian law. Their male counterparts have always played the World Cup on natural grass surfaces, and will for the foreseeable future.

The players say they believe there is a greater risk of injury on turf and that an artificial surface impacts both how the game is played and how the ball behaves.

Among the athletes joining Wambach are U.S. teammate Alex Morgan, Germany's Nadine Angerer, Brazil's Fabiana Da Silva Simoes and Spain's Veronica Boquete.

"The gifted athletes we represent are determined not to have the sport they love be belittled on their watch. Getting an equal playing field at the World Cup is a fight female players should not have to wage but one from which they do not shrink. In the end, we trust that fairness and equality will prevail over sexism and stubbornness," Dellinger said in a statement.

The Canadian Soccer Association issued a brief statement in response.

"Our lawyers will be reviewing any and all applications or information related to this. We will refrain from any comment until there has been a thorough review."

On Tuesday, a FIFA official visiting Canada in advance of the tournament next year said there were no plans to reconsider using artificial turf.

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Players file lawsuit in Canada over fake turf at 2015 Women's World Cup

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY - When the Aggie football team kicks off against Ole Miss on October 11, Kyle Field will feature new grass, along with a cannon firing.

Tuesday, the Texas A&M System announced it had completed the installation of new grass brought in from North Carolina. During the second home game against Rice on September 13, the two-game-old field began tearing apart, causing safety concerns for players. Heavy rains the night before the game combined with the grass being on the ground at Kyle for a little more than a month were cited as causes for the field's failure.

The new field brought in costs $300,000, and was said to have thicker sod so it will grow together faster. The company, Carolina Green, also has experience with mid-season field replacements.

Once the 2014 season ends, the field will be removed so the next phase of the $450 million redevelopment can continue.

Not only will there be new grass for the remainder of the season, the Corps of Cadets will once again fire a cannon when the Aggies score.

A tradition for years, there were concerns over the cannon being fired within the newly-closed-in stadium. For the first home game against Lamar, a cannon was fired from the practice field, with a live look at the firing shown on screens in Kyle. For the Rice game, no cannon was fired.

Now, officials with A&M believe they can safely fire the cannon from the southeast tower for the remainder of the 2014 season, and will reevaluate things in the off-season as the stadium redevelopment continues.

We are confident that this will provide a good solution during this transitional period, A&M Interim President Mark Hussey said in a statement. I appreciate the diligent efforts of the Offices of the Commandant of the Corps of Cadets and Environmental Health and Safety as well as A&M System officials, who are overseeing the project, for offering a viable and safe solution for helping us to ensure that the tradition of the cannon firing at Kyle Field continues."

Last week, a cannon was raised into the southeast tower and testing was conducted to try and find a solution, though A&M could not offer assurances at that time that the cannon would work in that location.

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Kyle Field, Now with New Grass, Will Also Have Its Cannon Back

Atlanta, Georgia (PRWEB) September 30, 2014

On September 1st, 2014, Patten Seed Companys new seed plant processed its first batch of grass seed in their facility on the grounds of Patten Seeds Super-Sod farm in Ft. Valley, Georgia.

Patten Seed bought the new Universal Coating Systems equipment to coat, treat, and bag larger 25 and 50 lb. bags of their TifBlair Centipede and Zenith Zoysia grass seed brands. Previously, the seed company had outsourced seed coating to a company in the western part of the US and they had bagged their own grass seed in only smaller 2, 5, 6, and 10 lb. bags.

The opening of this facility now allows Patten Seed to grow, clean, coat, treat, and bag all of their own seed, keeping everything local to the Southeast. This streamlining and centralizing brings efficiency to the process of getting the seed from the farm to the consumer, saves shipping expenses, gives them more control of inputs, and allows for a quicker turn around time.

Patten Seed Company/Super-Sod is a family-run business that employs experts in turf and horticulture. One of their most popular products has been their Soil3 organic compost, delivered in a cubic yard BigYellowBag, which they make partially from composted grass clippings from their sod and seed production. Patten Seed/Super-Sod continues to develop new garden products, foster gardening and landscaping, and always seeks to improve their farming practices, technology, environmental stewardship, and employee knowledge.

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Patten Seed Company Opens New Seed Processing Plant

QUESTION: I was walking through my yard, and my grass has been looking really good, but I started kicking up thousands of these little grayish-white moths or butterflies, and now I'm worried. What are they?

ANSWER: Oh my goodness, they're back. Those bad, bad tropical sod webworms, or perhaps it's one of their hungrier, more temperate cousins.

These things run in cycles that are hard to predict, but up until a few years ago, no one ever talked about sod webworms on this part of the Gulf Coast.

Now, for the past several years, they've been turning up every fall.

It's not those grayish moths with their distinctive long snouts that do the actual damage. It's their rambunctious young'uns, the caterpillars, which will eat grass blades to the ground. They don't eat roots, so the grass will usually recover, but not before it's weakened and the bare spots begin to attract weeds.

If you wait until the grass is visibly damaged, you've waited too late. The damage has been done and you'll just have to wait for it to recover.

But if you resolve to treat when you see the moths flitting about, laying eggs, you can treat these guys easily and safely. Simply get a small bottle of Dipel or Thuricide, which contains a disease that is harmful only to caterpillars.

Do it immediately, because once the caterpillars are large enough to see easily, it will be too late to kill them. They'll be too tough to die, and they'll have already had the fill of your plants.

Instead look for the moths, and start treating every 7 to 10 days as long as you see the moths.

QUESTION: I've been developing a community vegetable garden, and someone thinks we should use garden cloth to control weeds. He said we could just compost on top of that. What do you think?

Excerpt from:
Three annoyances: Sod webworms, weed fabric, Indian hawthorn

COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- The planned installation of new turf at Kyle Field has progressed more rapidly than expected and will allow the process to begin on Saturday, Sept. 27.

Carolina Green, assisted by Texas A&M University personnel, hopes to start laying the sod late on Saturday and should have the installation completed by Tuesday, Sept. 30.

The sod is being shipped from North Carolina and will arrive in 24-28, refrigerated semi-trailer trucks.

There will be no public access to the stadium during the installation, but it can be viewed via the Kyle Field webcam at http://www.kylefield.com.

The Texas A&M Football team is planning to practice on the new turf sometime before they depart to play Mississippi State on Oct. 4. The first home game on the new field will be on Oct. 11 versus Ole Miss.

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New Grass installation at Kyle Field Begins Earlier than Expected

A North Carolina-based company will replace Texas A&Ms football field with another natural surface at the cost of $300,000, sources told The Eagle on Thursday.

The move comes after torrential rains last Friday and Saturday when the Bryan-College Station area was inundated with 4.5 inches of rain in less than 24 hours, leading to sloppy conditions in Saturday nights game between Texas A&M and Rice. After the game, which A&M won 38-10, John Sharp, chancellor for the Texas A&M System, led the decision to make a change and bring in the grass from Carolina Green.

After the game, the chancellor asked the staff and the Kyle Field redevelopment committee to look at options, said Steve Moore, the A&M Systems vice chancellor of marketing and communications. He wanted to know how to provide the best competitive playing surface we could going forward and thats what led to this process and the decisions that have been made.

Carolina Greens sod, which is being shipped in on 24 refrigerated trucks, is grown on plastic and will ship with a much thicker sod base than the grass that was installed in early August, meaning it will take less time for it to take a firm hold at Kyle Field. The next home game is Oct. 11 when A&M plays Mississippi. Crews will begin installing the field the week of Sept. 29.

According to Moore, the installation will take about two days, which should give the Aggies ample opportunity to practice on the new surface before their Southeastern Conference home opener.

Aside from the thicker sod base, another reason Carolina Green was chosen is that the company has expertise in replacing fields in-season. Over the past five years, Carolina Green has done in-season replacements for the Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, University of Tennessee, University of Kentucky and University of South Carolina. Just last week, the Dallas Cowboys and Tennessee Titans played on surface that had been installed the week before by Carolina Green.

Moore said there were no discussions about switching to an artificial surface or moving games to other locations, and that university officials, as well as their Kyle Field redevelopment partners Populous and Manhattan-Vaughn Construction, did not originally anticipate any issues.

Populous and Manhattan-Vaughn have done a lot of stadiums and they had a lot of discussion about it, Moore said. There are a lot of different field experts out there. The prescription they used in terms of getting the turf, selecting the turf, putting the turf down and how it was put down was all well vetted. Had it not been for the rain, everyone is confident it would have worked very well.

He added, If you look around at our playing surfaces we have at A&M, whether its at Olsen Field at Blue Bell Park, Ellis Field for soccer or Kyle Field, traditionally weve had great, great turf. The feeling was that we made decisions that were consistent with that and that it was going to be a great surface for us for this year.

At halftime of last weeks game, Rice coach David Bailiff was seen on the sideline shouting with A&M Athletic Director Eric Hyman. However, after the game, Bailiff said he was satisfied the surface was safe enough to continue playing.

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Kyle Field getting new grass after poor field conditions during Rice game

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY - Those responsible for putting a field into Kyle Field thought they had the right grass for the 2014 season.

A first game, a significant rain storm and a second game later, and Texas A&M has called an audible.

A&M System officials said Thursday they had finalized a deal to bring new turf from North Carolina to replace the North Texas-grown grass that routinely was ripped and uprooted during the Rice game last Saturday.

In confirming the news originally reported by The Eagle, System spokesperson Steve Moore said there had been talks with top officials throughout the week which wrapped up Thursday with the deal to bring grass from the Carolina Green Sod company in Indian Trail, North Carolina, a company that is said to have thicker sod to settle in faster, and a company that has installed major sports fields in the middle of seasons on short notice before.

By the end of the month, the new grass will be trucked across the country and laid down in Kyle. A&M's next home game is October 11 against Ole Miss.

The previous field, grown by Tri-Tex in Tioga, Texas, had been down for just about 30 days before the home schedule began. Aggie Athletics field manager Leo Goertz told News 3 before the first home game against Lamar that the ideal time for a field to be able to properly set and grow together is 60 days, but that conditions had been good leading up to that game. Following the Lamar match-up, Goertz said the field had held up as good as he could have hoped.

Then, the day before the Rice game, 4.26" of rain wer recorded to have fallen at nearby Easterwood Airport, a record for any September 12 recorded. By the second half of Saturday's game, field crews were having to sprint as much as the players across the field to fill and repair holes where the turf kept coming up.

News 3 featured a story on the original grass during its Aggie Gameday pre-game show before the Rice game. Tri-Tex had also provided the turf for Kyle before the 2007 season.

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New Grass Ordered for Kyle Field After Turf Failures During Rice Game