A dog daycare turf maintenance plan: daily, weekly, quarterly

1. Pick up as it happens. Solids left on turf for an hour in July are a smell for a week. Bag and bin outside the play area.
2. Spot-clean vomit and diarrhea the same hour: lift what you can, rinse with volume, enzyme, and an oxygen-based oxidizer on any stain once the enzyme has dwelled.
3. Hose at close. The last dog out, then the whole yard with a hose on a shower setting and plenty of volume. This flushes urea down and out before bacteria turn it into ammonia overnight.
4. Enzyme on the hot spots. Corners, fence posts, the gate, the water bowl area. Mark them on a laminated plan so a new hire knows where.
5. Blow standing water off low spots. A puddle overnight in August is algae by the weekend.
6. Look at the edges and seams on your way out. A chewed corner is a $175 fix today and a tripping hazard tomorrow.

Once a week, with the yard empty: power brush the whole area against the grain to lift matted paths and open the infill; apply enzyme over the whole yard, not just the hot spots, and let it dwell overnight; walk every edge and seam; check the infill depth at three marked spots and write the numbers on the log; check that water still drains off the low spots in minutes. A daycare that owns a power broom gets its money back in the first summer; the power brushing we do on the professional visit is the same tool with more time.

Monthly from May through October and quarterly the rest of the year. The visit is a full Premium Restoration: debris off, power brush, high-volume rinse, enzyme treatment with a real dwell, algae treatment where the shade has started it, second rinse, antimicrobial across the whole yard, infill measured and redistributed, seam and edge inspection, and before-and-after photos. We schedule for a closed day or an early morning so the yard is dry before the first drop-off.

Daycare infill fails in the busiest zones first: inside the gates, along the fence where dogs patrol, around the water station. In our experience those zones need extracting and replacing every year or two under heavy use; the middle of the yard goes several years. The signs are infill that stays dark after a rinse, a smell that returns within days of treatment, and a crust you can break with a finger.

The arithmetic: a 2,000-square-foot yard usually has 300 to 400 square feet of true hot zone. At $0.75 to $1.50 per square foot for new odor-control infill, that is roughly $225 to $600 per cycle, against replacing the whole yard's infill at four to five times that. Doing the zones on a cycle keeps the whole yard off the schedule. Our infill guide covers the measuring and the material.

Keep a log with a line per task: date, task, area, product used, staff initials. Add the weekly infill readings and a note on anything found. Keep every product label and safety data sheet in a binder by the hose. Attach our visit reports and photos.

The log does four things: it shows a prospective client that the smell they do not notice is not luck; it answers an inspector; it documents maintenance if the turf manufacturer ever asks; and it tells you, in the numbers, when the hot-zone infill is due before the dogs tell you.

Call when the smell is back within a week of your own enzyme treatment, when the hot-zone infill stays dark after a rinse, or to set up the monthly summer schedule. A Premium Restoration on a 1,501 to 2,000 square foot yard is $599; 2,001 to 3,000 is $749; 3,001 to 5,000 is $899, with heavy odor treatment at $75 to $150 when a zone needs it. For a yard on a quarterly cycle, TIMELESS ELITE is $139 a month with 10 percent off infill and repairs; the Pet Turf ELITE plan at $169 is built for yards like this, and Brian will walk you through what it adds when he calls.