Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how do they create patterns in a baseball field? Groundskeepers at baseball parks have traditionally created checkerboard, diamond, and angle patterns in the field. These patterns have become more elaborate in recent years. Baseball fans might remember the star patterns created at Coors Field in Denver to commemorate the All Star Game.
These designs are not all that complicated and could be easily duplicated in your own lawn. The designs are created through a process called lawn striping. To create lawn striping designs of your own, you only need two pieces of equipment, a lawn mower and a roller. Many professional groundskeepers use old fashioned real mowers to cut a stadium's grass. Attached just behind the blades of the mower is a lawn
roller that bends the grass down. Some lawnmower manufacturers are beginning to make riding mowers with full with rollers mounted to the rear of the mower to make this task easier. Whatever pattern you make is revealed by the light shining off the bent grass. A checkerboard design is created by passing over the grass in side by side rows, first going north to south, then making east to west stripes in the grass that intersect the north to south stripes.
In this way, you alternate the way the grass bends. When you look at your lawn, the stripes of grass leaning away from you look lighter. This lighter green is caused by the sunlight reflecting off the entire blade of grass. In the darker green stripes formed by the blades of grass leaning towards you, the sunlight is reflecting only off the tips of the blades. Different grasses can be used to accentually the striping effect, including rye grass, fescue, and
blue grass. You won't see such a big contrast between the stripes colors if you have a warm season grass such as bermuda or zeisa. Watering the grass after mowing can make your patterns stand out even more. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does that how stuff works dot com, and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the house stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff hs W. The house
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