Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.
I normally pick out the most popular search terms to try to answer the underlying question, but this was a single and very different search term and I thought it was very interesting.
The title tells the story. Someone is of the opinion that the greenkeeping advice they received from an adviser caused the opposite result from the one they expected.
This week I thought I would take some time out to address some of the questions that have led site visitors here from the search engines. We did this for a week last autumn and it was very successful with a lot of good feedback from readers.
The first one stood out to me as it seems to be a very common issue around the country and is really very simple to fix. We have a had a variety of different questions centred on greens becoming slippery.
If your green maintenance budget was cut in half this year what would you do?
Most clubs when faced with cuts to the greenkeeping budget, will try at all costs to keep the most important work in the plan. Unfortunately, important frequently gets confused with dramatic, which means that the big expense of top-dressing in the spring and autumn usually stays in the plan and I wish it didn’t for all the reasons I’ve explained over many articles.
Meantime, the work deemed less important and which of course is less dramatic is often sidelined or dropped as a result of a fear of what might go wrong if the big, sexy stuff is missed. These big jobs “must be doing a lot of good”, or so the thinking goes, because they’re so expensive and disruptive?
I genuinely believe that it's possible to come up with a formula to fix your bowling green, regardless of it's current condition. This is due to one over-riding fact that I've discovered after looking at literally hundreds of greens. They are all at some stage of what I've termed the Circle of Decline. The critical factor in making this possible is simple. You must know what you are dealing with and there is no way to find that out without carrying out some hand dirtying investigative work. So let's get dirty!
Winter Greenkeeping Strategies have to a large extent been based on preventative fungicide, putting the green to bed and hoping for the best. This overlooks the huge opportunity greenkeepers have to make a real difference through applying some sound Winter Greenkeeping Strategies right through the closed months.
