Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.
Each individual grass plant releases sugars through its roots to attract beneficial microbes. In return, those microbes mine nutrients from the soil, cycle organic matter, suppress disease, and improve soil structure. This is so important to the health of plants that they give up around 50% of the sugar they produce during photosynthesis as root exudates.
Sand Top Dressing - that ubiquitous and apparently simple greenkeeping operation indulged in by most clubs annually is actually a much more complex operation than most give it credit for. In this article John Quinn explains the mechanics of top-dressing. He explains what it can and can't do and why you must understand some soil science before top-dressing is considered.
So far on our investigation into soil texture we've discussed the problems of building sand castles, why you shouldn't let the Treasurer buy sand for you and a few other less important details like the complexity of sand, soil formation, particle size distribution, macro and micro soil porosity and we finished last time by looking at the famous Soil Texture Triangle
In the first part of this series we discovered that the ideal bowling green soil (or rootzone) will be 50% space, 5% organic matter, with the remainder (45%) being made up of mineral matter, namely Sand, Silt and Clay. These are the 3 universal mineral components of soil. Part 1 finished with an explanation of the soil fractions, 5 of which were sands of varying sizes.
In part 2 we found out a little bit more about sand and it's behaviour as a drainage medium and we discovered a little more about how soils are formed. We finished by looking at the importance of sand particle shape and size in bowling green rootzones.
Today we'll try to get a better handle on Soil Texture and discover how some of the soil fractions come about. In particular we will look at the complexity of sand, before getting a better understanding of how soils are formed in the first place. This will help us to understand the importance of sand in bowling green maintenance, but hopefully also to understand more fully, its limitations.
