Bowls clubs are often divided on whether to water the green or not. When I visit clubs to advise on this, they are generally under-watering their greens.
This results in poor surfaces, especially when a green is still within the renovation phase as described in my book Performance Bowling Greens.
You can think of Soil Moisture Deficit in much the same way as a negative balance in your bank account.
Soil Water Balance Management…
…is almost unheard of within bowling circles or certainly the bowling circles I have been involved with but is a critical part of the management program to get right for high performance and deals with the management or Read more
irrigation management is critical but straight forward
Irrigation is on everyone’s mind at the moment, but how much is enough?
As a general rule greens lose approximately 3-4mm of moisture per dry day to evapo-transpiration, although this can vary with conditions; that’s approximately 25mm or 1 inch per week.
Again a very general rule is that many of the more popular automatic sprinkler systems will apply around 1mm of water for every 2 minutes of run time.
So again as a general rule to replace a week’s worth of losses you should be running the sprinklers for around 50 minutes in the week.
Now I will add a qualification or four to that:
requirements can vary widely depending on location and conditions.
don’t apply light applications on a nightly basis, try to group these into heavier and less frequent applications for best effect.
try to move to a water balance sheet type system to manage irrigation more accurately…it will pay off quickly
don’t rely on a typical bowling green irrigation system to apply water evenly or in sufficient volume…always check and measure what you are doing.
Over-seeding of bowling greens seems like a straight-forward task; you put the seed on and the green’s bare areas recover.
However, one of our regular readers has raised an interesting question today about over-seeding and it is by no means isolated.
After over-seeding the green, the seed has taken well on the parts of the green that least needed it and nothing has happened on the barest areas of the green where the new grass is most needed!
This is unfortunately a very common problem and is usually related to our old friend Localised Dry Patch (LDP).
The barest areas of the green going into the autumn are usually the spots that have been affected by LDP and as such are bare due to lack of soil moisture.
This means that quite a lot of preparation is required before seeding and this might even include heavy watering to get the soil to hold enough moisture to get the seed off to a good start.
It might be necessary to do some light cultivation with a Sarrell roller or hand cultivator and, if the underlying soil is still dry and water repellent, a wetting agent would also help.
The main problem is that we are now a bit late for further seeding, although this largely depends on the weather and temperature. I have seeded successfully up to Christmas in the past, but success with this is obviously dependent on the remainder of the winter. Certainly if we were to get another one like last year, even early seedings will struggle to survive the winter.
If anybody is still having trouble getting grass cover on the green after overseeding please feel free to contribute ideas, tips or questions to the site.
A Free bowls-central guide outlining a model for the rejuvenation and future success of bowling clubs, through expansion of membership and community involvement More details.
