Today is World Soil Day (WSD). A campaign that aims to connect people with soils and raise awareness on their critical importance in our lives.
To mark the occasion The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has produced a wonderful series of Postcards that highlight the main threats to world soil health. In the UK we don’t do particularly well with many of them.
I received a nice email from a reader yesterday as follows:
"Hi John, I thought I'd share this pic from 8 weeks ago and now following your aeration and no sand advice... must say impressive in such a short time ... thanks. Looking forward to the next task email from yourself" VT
Soil Moisture and Bowls Green Performance are so closely linked that we assume we know everything there is to know about it. More sand will make it better surely? Master Greenkeeper John Quinn has been digging a little deeper than most and putting his students to work on some experiments to get to the root of truly High Performance Bowls Greens.
Bowls green performance and organic matter go hand in hand. In this article we continue to test our hypothesis about the effect Organic Matter has to bowls green surface performance. John compares the different kinds of organic matter in greens and shows how we can measure these to direct us to a better maintenance regime that focusses on performance and produces healthier greens and greens that are more economical to maintain.
"Bad rinks", "bad roads on rinks", "straight hands", "off the heads", just some of the multitude of anecdotal evidence for poor bowling green performance. Meantime the real causes of problem greens are not only missed, but are actually being perpetuated by some of the maintenance practice we employ. The Objective Measurement of Bowls Green Performance is long overdue so we can move on and start to work on the real issues.
