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Author: John

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

The Maintenance YOU MUST do now for a PERFORMANCE BOWLING GREEN next season!

Autumn and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance GuideHow has your bowling green performed this season?

If the answer is “brilliantly”! we truly have a high performance bowling green, then congratulations you probably need read no further.

However, if your club is like many I speak to then its probable that your answer will be somewhat less positive and that you could benefit from my new 34 page guide to Essential Autumn and Winter bowling green maintenance and preparation.

During this season has your green suffered from:

  1. Slow play?
  2. Un-even surface?
  3. Un-predictable rinks?
  4. Inconsistent surface?
  5. Soft and spongy turf?
  6. Bumpy rinks?
  7. Fungal disease, slime, moss, weeds or dry patch?

These are all common problems in the UK and the answer to beating them lies in the Autumn and Winter Maintenance you do starting NOW.

In my new Autumn/Winter Maintenance guide you will learn:

  1. The 3 most important issues in Performance Green Management
  2. The reason many greens never improve, this is an eye opener for many clubs!
  3. The Maintenance items you MUST DO NOW to prepare your green for next season
  4. The commonly used maintenance practices YOU MUST AVOID if you don’t want to make your green worse than it already is. Unfortunately, many clubs will already be preparing to undertake these tasks unaware that they are about to damage their green further.
  5. A guide to the Autumn/Winter maintenance you need to do to get your green off to a flying and early start next spring

Please don’t fall into the trap that many clubs will this autumn: make sure you are performing the correct maintenance tasks to give your green the best chance next season.

Autumn and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance Guide
Autumn and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance Guide
The ultimate guide to Autumn Renovation and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance detailing the essential maintenance your bowling green needs through this most critical of maintenance seasons. What you do now will determine how the green performs next season. INSTANT DOWNLOAD ebook more details
Price: £9.97

How to end poor bowls green performance

A very large number of bowls greens in the UK have problems with performance and surface predictability.

It’s quite common for the bowls green to be praised as the best ever one week, only to to be un-recognisable as the same green the next.

Many times this is blamed on the weather or the greenkeeper or both, but the fact is that the majority of greens are already in poor condition due to decades of inappropriate maintenance.

This article explains this problem in more detail and this eBook holds the key to ending
this frustration permanently.

How to harness nature to achieve a performance bowls green

In Performance Bowls Greens, a practical guide there is a simple but detailed procedure for getting back to natural greenkeeping, reducing maintenance costs and ensuring predictable and affordable long term bowls green performance.

In it John Quinn explains what has gone wrong in UK bowls green maintenance, why we rely on industry norms at our peril and more importantly what we can do about it.

This best selling eBook, breaks down all of the myths and fairy tales about bowls green maintenance including why you shouldn’t be top-dressing your green or following many of the green keeping practices currently deemed essential.

No bowls club can afford to be without this eBook.

The great top dressing hoax

Top dressing with high sand content composts has become a tradition in bowling green maintenance but it is far from beneficial.

  1. After 3 decades of routine top-dressing most greens are “inert” and can’t support a population of beneficial soil microbes.
  2. Soil microbes break down thatch and release nutrition to the turf.
  3. High sand and thick thatch usually result in Localised Dry Patch which is a long lasting, devastating condition that causes the soil to repel water.
  4. The surface smoothing and levelling actions of top-dressing are massively over-sold and of very little relevance to producing a smooth, fast green.
  5. Most bowling green irrigation systems are inadequate to start with, but are completely useless in the face of localised dry patch.

The process of top-dressing a bowling green has become so ingrained in our maintenance practices that it is hard to find a club that doesn’t do it, but over the decades it has devastated a huge number of greens in the UK.

Do your green and your wallet a favour and break the habit this year.

Performance bowls green properties.

How can we ensure a consistently high performance bowling green that is economical to produce and maintain. There are 4 specific goals that we need to achieve to say that we have such a green:

Green Speed; the actual surface pace that we can reasonably expect from the green on a regular basis.
Consistency; the ability of the green to replicate high performance throughout the day, week and season and also from season to season.
Predictability; the ability of the green and individual rinks to be set up for play of a reasonably predictable nature, time after time and over time.
Achievability; high performance must be not only physically achievable but also relatively easily achievable and for that the program we put in place must tick the following boxes; it must be:

Workable; with “in-house” labour and skills or with a financially sustainable amount of “bought in” labour and skills.
Sustainable in terms of its environmental, financial and infrastructural requirements.
Replicable time after time within the parameters defined above.
Minimum Input in terms of artificial fertilisers, chemicals and expensive bought in machinery or skills.

The goals we have set above require us to produce a very specific kind of green surface.