Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.
A persistent idea in bowling greenkeeping is that low areas can gradually be corrected by applying a little extra top dressing each year. Not necessarily all at once. Just keep feeding material into the dips and, eventually, the surface will come back up. It sounds perfectly reasonable. The difficulty is that both the mathematics and the turf's structure work against it.
We can establish that quickly with the Peak Sand Texture Only Analysis. Using laser diffraction, the laboratory measures the actual percentages of sand, silt and clay in your rootzone and plots the result on the Soil Texture Triangle. A soil test that gives us something far more useful than guesswork. We will instantly know whether your green genuinely needs more mineral material — or whether years of conventional top dressing have already pushed it towards the excessively sandy conditions I call Peak Sand. This information can completely change the autumn renovation programme.
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Phosphite (PO₃³⁻) is a reduced form of phosphate (PO₄³⁻), the familiar phosphorus source in traditional fertilisers. Although the two compounds are chemically related, their behaviours in plants and soils differ significantly. Phosphite is highly soluble and readily absorbed through both roots and foliage, making it a highly efficient delivery mechanism for phosphorus-related benefits, including disease and pest resistance, acting as a trigger for some of the plant's remarkable natural defence mechanisms.
There comes a point in every long-running problem where the evidence becomes too obvious to ignore. For many of the bowling clubs that get in touch to ask about solving green performance problems, I think they are now at that point with sand.
After another summer of heat, dry patch, weak turf, hydrophobic soil, disease pressure, uneven surfaces, irrigation panic and increasing renovation costs, the question can no longer be: “What top dressing are we putting on this autumn?”
