Author: John

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

July 6, 2013

Bowling Club Turnaround-Free Report

FREE REPORT

Bowling Club Turnaround

5 Actions Your Club Must Take Now!

First it was a double dip and now it seems that the UK is on for a Triple Dip recession! With all this doom and gloom around, its no wonder that many bowling clubs are like rabbits caught in the headlights.

It seems like there is nothing we can do to ensure the survival of our bowling clubs never mind actually increasing revenue and building a successful, thriving club for the future.

Well, its easy to get caught up in the misery of it all, especially when you look out of the window and see grey skies and rain. Then the news comes on and its all flood warnings and danger triangles! Long summer evenings on the green seem like a universe away!

However, this is exactly the time when you have time on your hands to get your bowling club set up for a bright future.

Ignore the news and just take these 5 easy steps to turning your club around for the long term. I’ve written a new report detailing the 5 most important steps you Must take now to make sure your club is one of the lucky ones. There’s actually no luck involved, its just a matter of employing the right actions at the right time to set your club up for future success that many dismiss as impossible.

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Your Privacy is important to us and we will never share your details with anyone. We will send you your free report immediately and occasional updates from bowls central.

July 5, 2013

Performance Bowls Greens-the 4 biggest obstacles to success

When I set out to write my book, Performance Bowling Greens, it made me think about the main obstacles to success encountered by many of the bowling clubs I visit and in many ways it comes down to what can only be described as Common Sense versus Commerce. The 4 biggest obstacles I encounter again and again are as follows:

Desperation Mode; or a state of mind that permeates a club when nothing they do seems to yield the results they crave.
Lack of Consistency; which is direct result of the 1st obstacle, and is when the club repeatedly changes its approach to maintenance because it basically has no faith in any of the maintenance models it encounters.
Tradition; although a lot of the traditions in question are not that old.
Greenkeeping Myths.

The reasons for the problems I have just mentioned are mainly to do with the need that exists in every
industry to have companies or people who can supply materials and equipment in order for the work of that industry (in our case greenkeeping) to go ahead. So you see as greenkeepers or bowling clubs we are part of a commercial chain that needs constant lubrication in order to keep going. The end result of that process is the pressure put on all of us to try new things, new machines, new fertilisers, new chemicals etc. And of course this isn’t a bad thing in itself, because if it wasn’t for this continual process we wouldn’t have any of the tools we need to continue maintaining our green. The trouble comes when laymen or greenkeepers lacking confidence in their abilities are constantly bombarded with new “stuff” by “experts”. This leads to “new traditions” which lead to a lack of consistency, which leads to poor results, which leads to desperation for a solution and desperate people are willing to believe anything, so even myths can take on the appearance of common sense.

In Performance Bowling Greens I will be detailing a more measured and calm approach to bowling green maintenance based on scientific fact, a deep understanding of nature and the interaction between turfgrass and soil. An approach, in fact a full program you can follow to ensure that your green performs to a very high standard at a reasonable cost.

And its there that we will pick up the story tomorrow, as I will be looking at how heavily the future of bowling depends on the ability of clubs like yours to deliver consistent high performance on what can only be described as a shoestring budget.

You can get your copy of Performance Bowling Greens here. Meantime I’ll will be back tomorrow with more news.

July 2, 2013

Slime on bowling green turf

Slime on bowling green turf and squidge are disorders of turf that can be both unsightly and hazardous for players as they can both make the surface slippery.

Although they don’t cause damage to the turf as such, they are signs of underlying problems with your green.

The conditions that attract these disorders to your green are excessively wet and spongy turf, usually due to excessive thatch. The soil will usually also be very acidic as a result of anaerobic soil/turf.

The medium to long term solution is to deal with the thatch and you can get the low down on that here.

Immediate and on-going aeration will help a lot to get the process of recovery started, but this has to be part of a concerted program of work to deal with compaction, thatch and generally poor soil conditions.

The question of liming acidic soil comes occasionally, but this is not recommended as broadcasting of lime on fine turf can lead to immediate outbreaks of fungal disease and in any case it usually isn’t needed.

As soon as you start to get some oxygen back into the soil by relieving compaction and dealing with the wet and usually smelly, anaerobic thatch, the soil will start to “sweeten” again.

However there is one little lime based trick you can use to clear the green of the odd patch of slime to allow a match to go ahead and its detailed here.

The main issue is to start to follow a Performance Greens maintenance program to get over the conditions that caused the problem in the first place.

July 1, 2013

Bowls Greens don’t have beds!

I often hear the phrase “putting the green to bed” at this time of year.

It is the most frustrating thing to hear because I don’t know of any club that can afford the luxury of stopping work on the green now.

The autumn and winter period is the most important time to get on top of a range of big problems that blight bowling greens.

For example Thatch encourages diseases such as fusarium, insect pests like leatherjackets and chafer grubs and contributes significantly to the onset of Localised Dry Patch the modern scourge of bowling greens throughout the UK. As if that wasn’t enough excessive thatch also saps the speed from your green and causes heavy, unpredictable rinks, contributes to un-even surfaces, causes bumpiness and bad rinks, reduces the efficacy of fertilisers and encourages weed grasses such as annual meadow grass to predominate the sward.

Then there is Compaction which impedes natural drainage, causes shallow rooting of grasses (which leads to skinning on heads), impedes irrigation and rain penetration and causes root break. And that’s before we even consider its expertise at encouraging weed grasses such as annual meadow grass, its ability to severely reduce the efficiency of irrigation, efficacy of fertilisers and its major contributory role in the creation of un-even surfaces and loss of grass cover on edges and heads.

If you only deal with these two issues this winter you will have gone a long way towards creating a performance green; they won’t go away by giving the green “a rest”.

I recently uploaded a new 18 page special report on autumn and Winter Maintenance of the Bowling Green to the Shop which shows you how to deal with thatch and compaction this Autumn and Winter as well as a host of other problems like Insect Pests, Fungal Disease, Localised Dry Patch and Moss.

June 25, 2013

How are we going to get there?

The last two articles have looked at the Now and the Where of planning for the future.

Now that we have created a vision for the club, How will we reach our goals?

This is where you need a plan and as detailed in Bowling Club Survival and turnaround and fleshed out further in Bowling Club Membership, retention and growth I advise clubs to adopt the One Page Planning model.

This makes sure that every project required to achieve your vision of the future for your club is broken down into appropriately sized actions and that these are achievable, time-bound and identify who is responsible for their completion.

This is the fastest and surest way to success for your club.

To get started on your vision for the future download my Manifesto for a Thriving Bowling Club TODAY!.