Home » Archives for John » Page 57

Author: John

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

Tradition and Dissatisfaction.

“Traditional” Mowing Schedules are damaging a lot of clubs

Last week’s post on green-speed has raised a few questions, a lot of them along the lines of

“How can we afford to cut the green 7 days a week?”

In the introduction to my book Performance Bowling Greens I speak about the danger of traditions.

Traditions are funny things, because they don’t actually seem to need to be very old, or for that matter very sensible for them to take hold; they only need a bit of support from a few people and Bingo! They are “new” traditions.

One of the quirkiest? Cutting the green on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, usually early in the morning. Why has this become a tradition at many clubs?

Well it probably boils down to cost mainly and perhaps convenience and possibly a little bit of misunderstanding of the growth pattern of greens.

Following this cutting plan those playing on Monday evening, Tuesday, Wednesday evening, Thursday, Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday are not seeing or playing the green at anything near its best!

That leaves a lot of potentially dissatisfied customers!

So in answer to the question at the beginning, another question:

How can you afford not to?

However, in Bowling Club Turnaround terms remember dissatisfaction can actually be a good thing as it gives you a huge opportunity to move things to a better state and make an overall positive gain from an otherwise negative situation.

 

 

 

Bowls green maintenance schedule

A lot of the web searches that lead people to this site are based around a desire to find a catch all, fool proof, guaranteed to work, easy to implement Bowls Green Maintenance Schedule.

Quite a lot of people actually search using the term: “Cheat Sheet for Bowling Green Maintenance”, and although the assumption would be that this is going to be impossible to find, it’s actually more credible a desire than you might imagine.

Perceived wisdom in the greenkeeping world would insist that the answer to this quest should begin with the phrase “well every green is different, so there is no such thing as a one stop shop for bowling green improvement”. Does that sound like a salesman speaking to you? Yes? Well that’s because it usually is!

However, this isn’t necessarily true.

The fact is that a very large percentage of the people who use this site, or who I meet or talk to about bowling greens, express almost identical problems with their greens and the reason for that is two-fold:

  1.  There are actually very few things that can go wrong with greens; the majority of “problems” merely arise as symptoms of one or two basic underlying issues, which in turn, are related to bad maintenance practices.
  2. Almost every sub-standard or un-predictable bowling green surface is a result of clubs following the “industry standard” of greenkeeping which is dangerously flawed.

So what is the big answer?

Well, although it is really Read more

Bowls Club Survival and Turnaround

eBook details: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

The book is split into 7 sections as follows

  1. How to stem the flow of cash out of your club starting today and how to prime a pump that will see more cash flowing into your club effortlessly.
  2. The remarkable 10 Minute MBA or how to build a business model that works for your club.
  3. An amazingly simple but powerful formula that will ensure your club stands head and shoulders above all of your competition.
  4. In a revolutionary take on the Marketing of your rejuvenated club we turn the commonly accepted view and perceived “wisdom” about Marketing firmly on its head! In this remarkable section we demonstrate  “paint by numbers” instructions for achieving all of the members you want with a vastly reduced Marketing budget.
  5. Step 5 provides what can only be described as ABC style instructions and guidance to turn your club into a smooth, efficient and profitable machine.
  6. In step 6 you’ll discover a remarkable system for adding 20-30% of your current income straight onto your bottom line profit!…by dealing with waste in your club.
  7. “Step 7 is essentially a method for bringing all of the previous steps together into an automatic club improvement system. Even after you’ve applied the first 6 steps and have a thriving, profitable club; this step pretty much guarantees that even a very efficient club will improve bottom line performance by at least 10% every 3 months”.

Bird Damage to Bowls Greens

Bird Damage to Bowls Greens

Bird Damage to Bowls Greens is a common issue faced by greenkeepers. A few readers have been writing in to ask about dealing with birds digging up their greens and quite rightly enquiring as to what can be done to control the bird activity.

Well, although there are occasions when birds will dig up turf on speculation that there might be some food, its unusual for them to cause widespread damage to large areas of the green unless they have a dead cert food supply.

Even though there might not be any obvious signs of grubs or insects, if there is significant bird activity (especially during mild spells) then it is also likely that leatherjackets are active.

Leatherjackets are the larvae of the Crane Fly (Daddy Long Legs) and they are voracious consumers of turf roots. They will usually continue to feed on grass roots right through the winter period.

If bird activity is very localised on just a few small areas of the green this might be explained by mossy turf as it easy to dig up, so if you have areas of moss this might explain the problem too.

I am often asked help o how to deal with the birds in these cases, how to keep them off the turf or to scare them away. However, in most cases it is important to remember that the birds are only the messengers, bringing you news and some measure of control over a very serious problem for your green.

The leatherjackets will do a huge amount of harm to your green, much more then the damage caused by the birds. Once a tribe of leatherjackets has munched its way across your green you could lose large areas of turf as there are no longer any significant roots left. This manifests itself as large areas of yellowing turf.

So the advice is:

  1.  don’t shoot the messenger!
  2. keep thatch under control
  3. aim for a dense, tight sward of perennial grass
  4. use a balanced eco-system approach to your greenkeeping

On the subject of ecological greenkeeping, here is how one golf course manager in Canada deals with insect problems:

 

Circle of Improvement

My post yesterday looked at the huge extent to which the top 100mm (4inches) of our greens have been subjected to sand over the previous 3 or 4 decades.

Today I’d like to elaborate a little on my thinking about taking a green from that state to one of High Performance.

The recovery process is based on encouraging that same top 100mm to return to a state that is akin to a natural, healthy living soil. This of course takes time as we are actually waiting for nature to produce more organic matter to ameliorate the sand to bring the soil back to a state where it can support a large, thriving population of soil microbes.

If you imagine my sketch of the “Circle of Decline” as a water wheel spinning fiercely in a clockwise direction; in other words out of control due to inappropriate maintenance. Each application of sand, pesticide, excessive N fertiliser, etc only serves to set the wheel spinning ever faster in the wrong direction.

The performance greens program is aiming to make the wheel turn in the opposite direction so a lot of the effort at the beginning is simply to slow the wheel down gradually until it is eventually stopped. The program then needs to get the wheel to start turning in the other direction.

Once it starts to turn in the right direction every bit of the correct maintenance program just makes it go faster and faster, so although the recovery process is slow at first, it builds very quickly once things are turned around.

We then start to see the action of what I am going to call the Circle of Improvement due to lack of imagination!

Every ounce of new Read more