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Winter Mower Servicing

Another popular subject this month has been Winter Mower Servicing and in particular what you should expect of your local service workshop.

There have been many tales of work not being done properly and overcharging for service. Here is the minimum that you should expect to be included in a quote for winter service:

  1. Full engine service including checking electrics, starting mechanism, new spark plug, all filters and oil change.
  2. Replace bottom blade (new blade ground-in first)
  3. Re-grind (not back lap) cylinder
  4. Check roller bearings and advise if worn (adjust if possible)
  5. Re-set cylinder to bottom blade clearance and check for even cut
  6. Re-set mowing height to that specified by club.
  7. Treat and touch up paint on any areas of rust
  8. Check and adjust clutch settings
  9. Check belts and replace if worn
  10. Check Groomer and re-set to height specified by club
  11. Check and adjust chain tensions
  12. Lubricate all points
  13. Free off and lubricate all adjustment mechanisms and check for proper operation
  14. Check all cables for wear and replace/re-adjust as required

This is a minimum list and your particular brand of mower might have further items that will need to be checked. Check the manufacturer’s handbook for details, or better still request a winter service checklist from your local dealer.

Now is the time to check that this has all been done properly, not when you are half way across the green with a broken down mower on opening day morning!

Bowls Club Survival-are you ready yet?

Yesterday we looked at one of the biggest barriers to a successful bowling club turnaround: procrastination;

Ok so it’s hard to get yourself motivated and started and ready sometimes, but there comes a time when you really do have to stop “getting ready”. Some people are even now getting ready to…”get ready”.

One of the biggest excuses I hear from bowling clubs is that they must have someone with proper qualifications behind them before they can tackle the turnaround of their “business” properly; and a whole lot of them think they need some guru with an MBA.

Now, the MBA or Master of Business Administration is a very useful degree and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of money getting one and I admire those who do; but you know what? A lot of time and money spent studying what is essentially a very simple subject does not automatically make good business people.

I have created my own MBA program to help club committees get to grips with what they need to know about turning around their bowling club (business) in 10 minutes flat. I have imaginatively called this, (pause for fanfare and drum roll):

The 10 Minute MBA

My 10 Minute MBA is obviously a very short version of the original, but once it’s in your head, its in there forever and you can apply it to any business situation to get straight to what is important.

My 10 Minute MBA is essentially a diagram or a method for structuring your approach to club business and the actions you take within it everyday to make sure you are:

  1. always sure of what you should be doing and what your club is all about
  2. confident that you have covered everything you need to do
  3. certain that you are spending the right amount of money on the right things
  4. positive that you are reaching your intended audience with the “right” message
  5. delivering an experience that wows your customers, user groups and/or members
  6. making money

My 10 Minute MBA helps you to:

  1. define your club’s future business goals exactly
  2. tell your members, customers and prospects about your offer in the most effective and efficient manner possible
  3. Deliver your offering to the market in the smoothest, most profitable and most integrated way
  4. Develop and retain the very best staff and volunteers who ooze your club’s philosophy from every pore
  5. Innovate in a way that will leave your competition in a pool of sweat.

Is it expensive? It makes up one section out of 7 in my eBook Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and at the moment you can pick up your copy for under £20!

How long will it take to learn it? Well there is a clue in the title; if you can’t work it out from there it maybe isn’t for you at this moment.

I do hope you can make the sacrifice in money and time to get your 10 Minute MBA. I promise it will accelerate your club turnaround and cast a whole new light on running your club as a long term successful business.

Bowls Green Maintenance

green maintenance

A very general title for today’s article, but it reflects the current industry desire for a fix all solution to achieving a good bowling green.

Most clubs are unhappy to some extent with the performance of their bowling greens.

This leads to an open ended search for solutions where the searcher i.e. the bowling club or bowling club management official simply looks for information from whatever source to help with the perennial problem of the bowling green.

If this is you, if you simply don’t know where to start in your quest for the truth about achieving a consistently good bowling green here is my suggested reading in order of importance. You can click on these links for more in depth information:

  1. Top-dressing
  2. Thatch
  3. Compaction
  4. Green Speed
  5. Green Consistency

 

 

Turf grass leaf growth factors

turf grass

Moving on from yesterday’s post which detailed the structure of grass plants, today I want to go into more detail about the processes and factors related to the growth of turf grass.

Leaf Growth
When we think of turf it’s easy to imagine that each individual blade of grass is a plant. However, each of the blades we see in the turf is a single leaf of a plant that might have many other leaves. All growth occurs from the base of the leaf so that the bit we cut off is always the oldest part of the living plant tissue and it is this feature that allows the grass to be mown frequently without undue injury. Although the main function of the leaf is to manufacture food for the plant through photosynthesis and increase the biomass of the plant the leaf can also take in water and nutrients to some degree.

Factors which affect leaf growth

Environment
As we observed in the post introducing warm and cold season grasses there are certain environmental factors that affect the growth of the turf grass leaf.

Temperature
Temperature is one of the most critical factors in leaf growth.

  • Cool season (C3) grasses have an optimum temperature range of 160 to 240C
  • Warm season grasses (C4) have an optimum range of 270 to 350 C

Sunlight
Sunlight is the main energy source in photosynthesis which the plant must do to produce food in the form of carbohydrates. In shade the density of turf will decline significantly which is a sign that there is much less biomass (plant tissue) being created by the plants.

Soil
For successful growth the plants need a favourible soil environment that allows for unhindered root growth. When rooting is curtailed so is leaf growth.

Cultural factors

Mowing height
When the grass is allowed to grow higher this results in more leaf tissue and therefore a greater leaf area for photosynthesis which in turn results in a greater production of carbohydrates for plant food.

Nutrition

  • Nitrogen (N) – an increase in available Nitrogen will typically result in increased leaf growth.
  • Iron (Fe) – the availability of Iron helps to ensure that the plant has the correct level of chlorophyll synthesis which is needed for the photosynthetic process to work efficiently.
  • Water – a very high percentage of plant tissue is water and this makes it critical to plant survival and healthy growth.
  • Diseases – the control or discouragement of disease pathogens is essential to strong and vigorous plant growth.

Next time we’ll look at some of the different growth habits you will encounter in turf grass management.

Meantime, why not share your views in the comments? or drop me a line.

Photo thanks to Kevin Dooley

 

Bowls Green Maintenance Basics – Surface Consistency

Have you ever played a great game of bowls when everything on the green was perfect; you read every twitch on the rink and it seemed like you had finally got the green the way you wanted it.

The disappointment when you return to the green the very next day, prepare the rink in completely the same way but get totally different and inferior results is maddening.

What went wrong? or maybe what went right?

Like green speed, there is much debate about surface consistency, both in terms of consistency across the green surface and consistency of playing conditions over the season.

In order of their impact on green surface consistency these are the top 7 factors that you should bear in mind. Obviously there are others such as weather patterns, level of play etc, but these are largely out of the greenkeepers control and in any case do not figure highly in the management of green consistency.

  1. Fertiliser Policy; yesterday we talked about the role that Bio-Liquid fertilisers can play in producing Performance Bowling Greens. The use of these products is recommended primarily in order to help in the improvement of the underlying soil; but this has a knock on benefit of smoothing out the peaks and troughs of fast and slow growth to a more steady and slow growth pattern. I’ve made this my number 1, issue in achieving green surface consistency.
  2. Irrigation Management; understanding the water requirements and in particular soil water balance is an important aspect of green management. The finer grasses we seek to encourage can root more deeply than the weed annual meadow grass and as such our watering policy should be deeply, not daily.
  3. Localised Dry Patch Management; the scourge of many greens over the last 2 decades due, primarily to the overuse of sand top-dressings and the neglect of the soil/plant relationship. Localised Dry Patch is a condition (not a disease) that causes the soil to become hydrophobic (water repellent) and can cause major disruption to the surface levels. Localised Dry Patch is also a season long problem in most cases regardless of how much rain or irrigation there is; once it takes hold it is usually very difficult to overcome.
  4. Mowing Frequency; we looked at this issue in more depth last week. Mowing frequency is at least 100 times more relevant to green consistency than mowing height. Shaving the green down to 3mm is damaging to the grass plants and counterproductive in producing a performance green in the longer term. If we truly want a consistent green, we need to make some hard decisions on how we are going to manage the workload.
  5. Thatch Layer Control and Management; closely related to, and the catalyst for most other green maintenance problems, thatch is only a problem on intensively managed turf such as bowling greens. One of the most commonly discussed topic on this site.
  6. Compaction Control and Relief; one of the major catalysts for the build up of excessive thatch is the process of compaction of the soil. This causes the soil to become lacking aeration pore space and oxygen as a result.
  7. Sward Composition (grass types); a low priority on this list but none the less important in respect of the overall aim of the Performance Green Program. By doing the work required to encourage a tight sward of finer grasses we automatically do the things that encourage a healthy living soil and that is the key to a performance bowling green.