Across the UK this summer, bowling greens are being baked in the intense summer heat. Weeks of hot, dry weather have left surfaces bare, cracked, and rock-hard. For many clubs, the underlying soil has crossed into a more serious condition — hydrophobicity — where the soil physically repels water, a phenomenon known as Localised Dry Patch.
If that’s where your green is today, you’ve got a problem.
You can simply can't wait until your usual mid-September renovation
Review your Bowls Central Soil Analysis Service experience and you could win a Soil Sampler
I am frequently asked about the difference between our 80/20, 60/40 and 40/60 Premium Fescue/Bent Grass Seed Mixes. On the surface, it might just look like a simple percentage change, but there’s quite a lot going on behind those numbers that can affect both the long-term performance of your green and the cost of the mix.
As standard soil analysis offerings are generally obsessed with chemistry, a very low pH is often interpreted as a chemical imbalance, which, of course, it is. The question of why those acid cations are dominant on the soil colloid, remains unaddressed in most cases. Instead it seems that many advisers are jumping straight to the temporary, artificial correction advice to add lime, and as we have seen, for fine turf, that can be dangerous advice.
Each individual grass plant releases sugars through its roots to attract beneficial microbes. In return, those microbes mine nutrients from the soil, cycle organic matter, suppress disease, and improve soil structure. This is so important to the health of plants that they give up around 50% of the sugar they produce during photosynthesis as root exudates.
