Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.
There comes a point in every long-running problem where the evidence becomes too obvious to ignore. For many of the bowling clubs that get in touch to ask about solving green performance problems, I think they are now at that point with sand.
After another summer of heat, dry patch, weak turf, hydrophobic soil, disease pressure, uneven surfaces, irrigation panic and increasing renovation costs, the question can no longer be: “What top dressing are we putting on this autumn?”
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Who can forget 1976 when we all burned up through the summer holidays? And 1995 now seems like a stupid year for me to try to build a golf course in one of the driest regions of the country and it was tough work, but we didn't know what summer would be like from one year to the next. However, since the mid 90's, choosing your best summer has all become a bit of a Blur, sometimes with no Oasis in sight :-). I have now lost count of the summers like 76 and 95, because they have become all too regular and as we've seen more recently this is now starting to hit home hard for those of us trying to maintain greens.
A persistent idea in bowling greenkeeping is that low areas can gradually be corrected by applying a little extra top dressing each year. Not necessarily all at once. Just keep feeding material into the dips and, eventually, the surface will come back up. It sounds perfectly reasonable. The difficulty is that both the mathematics and the turf's structure work against it.
We can establish that quickly with the Peak Sand Texture Only Analysis. Using laser diffraction, the laboratory measures the actual percentages of sand, silt and clay in your rootzone and plots the result on the Soil Texture Triangle. A soil test that gives us something far more useful than guesswork. We will instantly know whether your green genuinely needs more mineral material — or whether years of conventional top dressing have already pushed it towards the excessively sandy conditions I call Peak Sand. This information can completely change the autumn renovation programme.
