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Understanding your target audience

Today I would like to introduce the concept of “a target audience”

I deal with this comprehensively in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and it takes a view that the successful bowling clubs of the future will look quite a bit different to the ones we are familiar with today.

The essence of this is that not all of your club’s revenue will come from bowlers and that you will need to set your sights on a much wider range of “customers” within your local community if your club is to thrive.

This is why I have repeatedly used the terms Member, Customer and User; to try to differentiate between the traditional bowling club member and the future mix of customers a club (the word “customer” of course emphasising the need for clubs to think like businesses) will require to focus on if it is to attract and sustain sufficient foot-fall to thrive in the future.

Of course, people won’t be conveniently Read more

Smooth and fast greens!

As always this season has started off with many greens playing “slow”. The usual reasons apply of course; mowing heights are still above summer level, the frequency of cutting is still low in many cases due to a really slow start to growth in many areas. Many greens are also thatchy and there has been a lot of moss about as we come out of winter, due partly to the excessively wet end to last summer and more significantly to long term Localised Dry Patch problems which are inherently linked to persistent moss problems. Oh yes and of course we are all still Read more

Irrigation Systems

Bowling green irrigation is one of the areas of bowling green maintenance that raises the most questions.

On the face of it, this appears to be a simple subject; install sprinklers (watering systems), switch them on when it’s dry and the green gets evenly watered and everybody’s happy!

In reality it is a minefield of decisions including; best system design for your green, water storage, watering schedules, when, how and how much to water, green speed, disease, dry patch, thatch etc.

I have assembled some more in-depth information regarding the watering of bowling greens here.

If you need any help with this subject please feel free to drop me a line directly.

Bowls Green Levels; what can be done?

 

Survey?

Laser surveying will tell you exactly where discrepancies occur down to about 1cm of change. This can be done on a 1 metre grid so that you end up with a very clear colour coded picture of the green surface.

However, once you have a survey result in front of you, what do you do with it?

Top Dressing?

Well you could embark on a program of localised top-dressing as I have seen some clubs do, but this is a largely futile process, as you simply can’t make a big enough impact in a reasonable timeframe for it to be truly noticeable or beneficial or worth the investment. In to the bargain, as you are doing this the green is changing all of the time.

Rolling?

Heavy rolling should be avoided, but regular light to medium weight rolling with a tru-level type roller is very beneficial.

Decisions

In the end you must Read more

Spring green renovation.

the new season is almost here

Spring bowling green renovation should be focussed on 3 main components:

1. the completion of the winter, deep aeration program
2. rejuvenation and aeration of the green surface
3. nutritional corrections

On greens in the non-drought affected areas of the UK, it should still be OK to carry out slit tining.

This is the last time we will get a chance to do this until autumn.

Two final operations with this machine will make all the difference to the greens ability to resist compaction in the early part of the season.

In drier areas, mini solid tining might be preferable and this can be done in addition to the slit tining in other areas.

If you have a thatchy green; identified by spongy turf, disease problems in winter and general poor health; you should scarify the green quite harshly in two directions to remove some of the fibre and mat that has built up over the winter months.

On healthier greens, where over-seeding was carried out last autumn you should avoid heavy scarification.

Lighter verti-cutting can commence once the sward is growing vigorously in May.

A question I get asked a lot is:

“ How much top-dressing should be applied in spring?”

The answer is a resounding “None”

Good luck with your spring bowling green renovation work.

Tomorrow we will have a look at turf nutrition requirements for pre-season

More detailed information on aeration here, thatch here and a range of one page factsheets here