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Doug’s Spiker

Doug has adapted his rotary mower to save a lot of back breaking work

Straight after my request for guest posts/articles Doug Smith shares this labour saving idea for light aeration of the green. This follows on from Rob’s recent post on hand fork aeration. I’ll let Doug do the talking now:

Hi John, I have been reading your advice  on green Aeration, the one on using a fork, I too have used a fork to
do the job, but only for a short time, I found it took far to long, and very hard work, so I gave it some thought,
and adapted  my lawn mower, [see photo,] I use it on my home lawn, twice a month, and on the Bowls green.
hope this is of some use to your readers.
Regards Doug Smith
Thanks very much Doug for sharing this with us and hopefully it will be the first of many from readers in the coming months.

What bowls green maintenance should be carried out before a game?

Concentrate on minimising lateral grass growth for greater speed and smoothness.

OK, so this is probably a bit late for this year, but keep a note of it for future reference.

This has been a popular question on the site.

The readers who searched on variations of this theme were essentially asking, “What can be done immediately before a game to improve the playing surface?”

Green speed is hampered by excessive thatch build up, which saps some of the momentum of the bowl, so although there isn’t much that can be done about this 5 minutes before the match starts, making thatch reduction and control a major part of the maintenance strategy will help a great deal.

The other major problem in achieving speed is the control of lateral grass growth on the green. This is when grass grows along the ground instead of straight up. The grass plants develop this tendency in order to avoid damage from the mower blades. It’s an evolutionary process; the grass plants that grow this way survive to create more vegetative growth.

So we want to discourage this habit and promote survival of the more upright plants.

To do this we can employ regular grooming, brushing and verti-cutting.

Using the groomer set to 1.5mm above cutting height for the cut immediately before the game will help a lot with this. The groomer attachment on your mower is designed to tease up lateral growth just prior to being cut by the cylinder.

If you don’t have a groomer on your mower you can usually fit a static brush just behind the front roller and this can also do a good job of teasing lateral growth to the upright position prior to cutting if set properly.

Regular verti-cutting will slice through the lateral growth and tease up blades that would otherwise not be cut properly

Worn Heads on the Bowls Green

Annual Meadow Grass takes over worn heads (photo by S Kennerley)

The rink heads on the bowling green are subject to higher levels of wear and tear than any other playable part of the green.

The concentration of foot traffic on these areas causes severe compaction of the soil resulting in poor growth characteristics and in many cases invasion by annual meadow grass. Due to the shallow rooting of this grass the heads can quickly become skinned and badly worn with little grass cover. I’ve uploaded a new Worn Heads Factsheet to the Mastermind Network area detailing what you can do to minimise and prevent wear and how to properly renovate heads so that they don’t keep wearing out.

Eric’s Spiker

 

Eric’s Spiker

Following on from Syd Kennerley’s recent article describing how he converted an old mower into a spiker and Doug Smith’s earlier article about adapting his mower to include a spiker; Eric Barklem from Halton Castle Bowling Club in Westhead near Ormskirk has been inspired to follow Doug’s example and has added a spiker attachment to his Atco mower.

Eric’s machine is a bit different from Doug’s as it uses a cylinder mower where as Doug has adapted a rotary mower.

I asked Eric how he approached the project and he Read more

Protection of Bowls Greens during “Real” Winters

Winter Protection Could be Critical

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the free winter maintenance report at the start of the winter.

Now here we are approaching the Christmas holidays and I don’t think many of you will have been able to implement much of the work that I recommend both in the Winter Maintenance Guide and in Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide.

This is of course due to it being too wintry!

Well the good news is that if you made even a start to the recommended autumn/ winter compaction relief work by getting one or maybe two passes made with the deep slit tiner, then the frost will be doing a lot of good by getting into the soil and heaving it into fissures in the compacted zone.

However, the bad news is two-fold:

  1. it is going to prove difficult to do any work on greens throughout most of the UK this winter due to excessive frost and snow cover on greens; The winter program is essential and if your particular corner of the nation is free of frost and snow you should bash on with the winter work as much as you possibly can.
  2. The worst effect of this excessive cold weather is that the soil temperature is being forced down to levels that we don’t usually have to put up with very often.

This second point is very important and will become increasingly so in the months and years to come.

What’s the problem?

Well, my old Mum has a saying: “We’ve never died a winter yet”, which of course means that we are resilient and can adapt our approach to life to cope with whatever it throws at us.

Is it time to apply this thinking to our bowling greens; do they need further protection from the winter than we currently afford them?

Although I am not advocating a panic buying type situation I do think it is time for us to look at Read more