Author: John

Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.

March 16, 2015

stop getting ready and get started

Starting off your club’s recovery process with too ambitious a plan can backfire on you early.

Making big plans is also a sure way to waste a lot of time; because the plan will just never be ready to roll out to the members, public, prospective customers etc.

The pursuit of perfection in this case would be a major hurdle to progress.

At its simplest the planning process can be a short meeting to decide what the 3 biggest issues facing the club look like, followed by a session on deciding the following:

What Actions do we need to take?
When will we have them completed by?
Who will be responsible for each Action?

When those 3 issues are dealt with, then you simply repeat the process.

For a step by step process you can follow to turn your club around go here.

Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround

In this ebook we take you through a groundbreaking, step by step blueprint to save your struggling bowling club and reveal the 7 key steps that you can start taking immediately to start making a serious go of your club. more details

Price: £9.97

March 14, 2015

Club Turnaround: A Formula for Managing Change

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things” Niccolo Machiavelli.

Well, the last days of the season are upon us again and it’s a good time to take stock and get a feeling for where the club is now.

Many of you are in the thick of it with Club Survival and Turnaround projects on-going and this will be a worrying time for you as the obvious income diminishes now that the green is closing for winter and the members are heading off to their indoor clubs or other winter activities.

Trying to turn a club around isn’t easy, but it can be made a whole lot easier if you understand what is going on behind the scenes.

I know it can seem a bit like herding cats at times trying to get support and consensus, but there are distinct and identifiable components to the process of organisational change and if you know what they are and how they work together, life becomes a whole lot easier.

The implementation of change in well established organisations and clubs, even “at risk” clubs is a seemingly impossible task. Well meaning members might start a project only to be shot down in flames at every step along the way. Who can blame someone for giving up when faced with this kind of inactivity?

However, if you arm yourself with a bit of insider knowledge about the change process, it’s amazing what can be achieved. Simply by understanding a little more about what’s going on beneath the surface you can adapt your project to suit the requirements of your own situation.

There are 3 main factors at play in my experience and I have Read more

March 12, 2015

Thatch Problems

Rootbreak is a common feature on greens where thatch is out of control

As bowling green maintenance specialists we get lots of questions every week about thatch. So here is a quick crash course on it; what it is, what it does and how to deal with it:

What is it?

Thatch is the name given to the mat of dead roots and shoots that accumulates on the surface of the green. Where moisture, nutrition and cultural practices are optimised for the desired grasses, thatch rarely becomes a problem. However, when soil air content is low, or if drainage is poor and the fertiliser program is not Read more

March 11, 2015

Lessons from Wimbledon…how to water your bowling green

We’ve just had the most amazing Wimbledon fortnight; lovely weather for the most part and to top it off the first British Men’s Singles winner for over 70 years.

One issue that has cropped up over and over again is the fact that the courts at Wimbledon are actively protected from rain and moisture during play and that presumably then they aren’t watered during the event either. This is a very controlled and artificial situation for a short period of time and you can be assured that the sprinklers will be going hard at Wimbledon this week to aid recovery of the courts.

This has fed into the age old debate about watering bowling greens. Some greenkeepers have a really tough job convincing their members that they should water the green at all during dry spells. It’s understandable of course because the hot weather seems to improve the green surface, especially in terms of speed.

There are three key things to understand.

The grasses we use in the UK are termed cool season grasses which means that they struggle to survive and perform well in prolonged periods of hot weather. Cool season grasses must close their leaf stomata in hot weather to preserve internal moisture and this has a negative effect on their ability to photosynthesize (produce food).
Soil and plant moisture evaporates (through evapo-transpiration) at an average rate equivalent to 25mm of rain a week even in normal summers.
Localised Dry Patch (LDP) is a devastating (at least to playing surface performance) disorder that is prevalent on many UK bowling greens due to decades of inappropriate maintenance and is exacerbated by low moisture. Once it takes hold it is almost impossible to correct in a single season. More on Localised Dry Patch here.

To conclude then it is usually preferable to water the green following a deeply not daily routine. The correct way to water a bowling green is detailed here.

March 9, 2015

a lot of hot air?

Air is a very important component of a Performance Bowling Green.

50% of a healthy, performance green will be air; 25% Micro-pores and 25% Macro-pores.

The Macro Pore or “aeration” space is where drainage happens.

The Micro-Pore or “capillary” space is where grass plant roots get their water and nutrients.

Tip the balance in favour of one or the other of these and things start to go wrong.

Compaction reduces the Macro air space in soil and inhibits drainage and root penetration. The soil now holds on to too much moisture and a whole raft of other problems ensue; particularly the build up of excessive thatch due to the anaerobic (lacking in oxygen) soil conditions brought about by the reduction in air space.

Thatch becomes a breeding ground for fungal disease and a base for Localised Dry Patch to take hold. The thatch doesn’t break down naturally as it should because there is a massive reduction in the population of aerobic soil microbes and they usually do this job.

Tip the balance the other way by applying excessive amounts of sand top-dressing and there is now too much air space, there is very little capillary space and the green starts to dry out too quickly. Localised Dry Patch now takes over, the surface is unpredictable and the soil can’t provide the nutrition the plants need naturally any more.

Yes, for a healthy living green that performs to order you need a lot of space; 50% air space.

Luckily, a healthy living soil knows how to do all of this without us.

We are only needed to help rectify the damage we inflict, which is mainly compaction and nutrient depletion through the removal of grass clippings.

Ahh! how simple!