Bob Glancy faces a challenge familiar to grounds managers everywhere -- doing more with a smaller budget. And, like most resourceful managers with well-trained crews the "more" always gets done.

Im Bob Glancy with the hard-working Citrus County (FL) Parks & Rec. maintenance crew. They do just about everything except for tackling nematodes, which they contract out.

Glancy and his team of 27 employees, ranging in age from 19 to 72, maintain the grounds for the Citrus (FL) County Parks and Recreation Department. These include county parks and sports fields, cemeteries, beaches and the county's boat ramps, fishing piers and docks. In all, his department is responsible for 106 properties comprising between 650 - 700 acres.

They don't mow and maintain them all; contractors do some of the mowing and trimming around county buildings. But their days, which start at 6:30 a.m., are incredibly busy nonetheless.

Glancy spent 20 years with Palm Beach Gardens on Florida's Atlantic Coast before moving north to take the Citrus County position.

"I like the outdoor lifestyle," he says. "And I like the instant gratification of seeing the results of the work."

Citrus County, located in west central Florida on the Gulf Coast is a popular destination for the lovers of outdoor activities, especially sports fishermen. The region was growing like crazy until the housing bubble burst a couple of years ago. Even so, a population now approaching 140,000 guarantee that the county's parks and sports fields are busy practically every day of the year.

The sports fields, located at four locations in the county's 773 square miles, get special maintenance attention. The fields are used six days a week, and on Saturdays host games and practices (soccer, baseball, softball) from morning into the evening. Glancy's crews perform every conceivable maintenance duty for them.

Sometimes — and it's rare — they run into a challenge that they're not trained or equipped to tackle. Most recently, it was an exploding population of microscopic but destructive plant parasitic sting nematodes on some of their nicer sports fields. They seemed to be creating havoc on the Tifway 419 Bermudagrass at the 8-year-old sports fields at Central Ride District Park in particular.

"Previously the turfgrass there was literally a carpet," says Glancy.

His crew took core samples at the fields and sent them to University of Florida/IFAS Extension. Tests showed a big jump in the nematode population. Glancy called for Southern Turf, headquartered in Sanford, FL, to make an application of Curfew soil fumigant to control the turf-damaging nematodes.

The nematicide, manufactured by Dow AgroScience, is labeled for use only by approved custom applicators on golf courses and athletic fields in eight southeastern U.S. states. In making an application the fumigant is injected via slits into the turfgrass where the liquid then moves through the soil as a gas. It's most effective on sandy soils.

Glancy waited until spring break, when organized sports take a break and students and their parents vacation, to close the fields and schedule the fumigation. Prior to the application, he went to the park and marked the sprinkler heads so they wouldn't be damaged during the application.

  "While you can never get rid of all the nematodes, it definitely knocked them down," Glancy says of the contracted service, which lasted just a single morning.

The treated fields began to show improvement within days after the treatment, he says.

The day that we talked with Glancy, some of his guys were out fixing up a salt-water dock, a popular location for fishermen and tourists. While his team knows its way around turfgrass and sports fields, every day seemingly brings a new and different park maintenance challenge, he says.