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Category: Greenkeeping

Cut Costs and Improve Performance in Bowls Green Maintenance

Sounds unlikely doesn’t it?

The fact is that many clubs could save between £750 and £1000 in the coming month and would actively be improving their green. You know by now what I am talking about if you are regular reader.

Incidentally, welcome to all of our new readers this month!

On most greens the addition of any more sand based top-dressing is actually harmful. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all greens, just most of them.

Leaving this out of the program will result in big savings in the region of those mentioned above.

Next, a prevalent practice used in our industry Read more

Doing Nothing vs Trojan Horses

With the end of the bowling season in clear sight, many clubs will have acquired a familiar temporary feature over by the roadside hedge somewhere. If you look closely there will probably be a pallet or five of bagged top-dressing, ready to go on the green as part of the autumn renovation program.

The bags might be plain or they might be covered in text and graphics proclaiming all of the benefits for your turf that are held within.

They are essentially Trojan Horses, in that they appear to be bearing good news and gifts, but they are actually full of sand (up to 90%) and represent the continued insistence of many clubs and consultants to pursue a program of desertification of bowling greens in the UK.

When your green was first constructed, it probably had an 8-10” (200-250mm) deep layer of topsoil (rootzone). An average bulk density for topsoil would be around 1.6 tonnes/m3. If we say that the average green is 36m X 36m we get an area of 1296m2. The volume of soil required to fill this is calculated thus:

 1296 X 0.25 = 324m3

Using our bulk density average of 1.6 we can calculate weight of soil required as follows:

324 X 1.6 = 518 Tonnes. So our average green was built using approximately 518 tonnes of topsoil.

Most hollow tining operations can penetrate the soil to 4 inches (100mm) and this is usually used in conjunction with top-dressing. This then means that top-dressing operations have been concentrated on about 40% of the actual soil used to build the green (the top 4 inches). 40% of 518 tonnes is 207 tonnes.

30 years of top-dressing with 5 tonnes of material each time is equal to applying 150 tonnes of highly sandy material and this disregards the soil being removed by the hollow tiner! This also assumes that your club only jumped on the train to la la land in the 1980’s; many have been at it for at least a decade before that. I also know of some greens where they are routinely throwing 10 tonnes of straight sand on every year, so these figures are only averages and are probably leaning towards the less crazy end of the spectrum.

Is it any wonder then that greens suffer from localised dry patch, excessive thatch build up, powder dry inert soil, compaction, disease, low microbe populations etc, when almost all of the top 4 inches of the green has been replaced by sand?

If this is the plan for your club this autumn it would be better for your green, if you just do nothing. Yes, even neglecting the green and failing to undertake any autumn renovation would be much less harmful to the long term health and performance of the green than following this program.

Maintenance Tips

I spoke to someone a while back who said he liked the site but thought it would be better if I included some “Greenkeeping Tips”! hmmm.

Anyway, always happy to help here is my suggestion on finding said tips on the site:

There is a search box at the top right of every page. If you type in any greenkeeping issue such as thatch, compaction, mowing etc, the search will return a list of related articles that you can click on to read.

There is also a growing library of fact sheets and reports on a range of greenkeeping subjects.

Slime on Bowls Green

Another enquiry that suffered from our email address problem on the web form was this one:

What causes small patches of black “slime” on our green and what are the short and long term fixes? The patches are slippery.

Now this is an easier one to fix than the myriad of problems being experienced by the bees!

Slime on the green surface is an indicator of acidic soil conditions. This is likely to be accompanied by dense thatch, compaction and a general lack of health and anaerobic conditions in the green and soil. The soil pH is likely to be very low.

The circle of decline fleshes this out comprehensively.

Tackling the root cause is of course the best way to proceed in the long term and just about anything you read on this site about green maintenance will point you in the right direction, with frequent aeration being the most beneficial practice to concentrate on.

In the short term you can get rid of the slime by adding a teacup full of farmers lime to a bucket of tepid water.  Stir this until it is fully dissolved and then make up to 20 litres with cold water.  Make sure that this is fully mixed before adding to a knapsack sprayer and spot treating the areas of slime.

Use the sprayer as you would for any other application i.e. by walking over the area and spraying as you pass; don’t stand still to spray individual areas as this will result in overdosing and possible damage to the grass.

Walk over the green in two directions, pulling the trigger each time you come to a patch of slime.

Final precautions: Don’t handle the lime without eye and skin protection and make sure that the sprayer is clear of all total weed-killer that it might have been used for previously. Don’t be tempted to use the lime in its powder form on the green.

Top dressing and over-seeding in Spring

seeding in spring is not recommended

I’ve had a couple of enquiries asking about the correct methods, quantities and materials for Spring (pre-season) over seeding and top dressing of bowling and golf greens.

This is easy; the correct thing to do in this respect is…Nothing!

Over-seeding into a sward that is about to become very vigorous as spring progresses is futile. The new seedlings don’t stand a chance against the locals.

Any new seedlings that did by some miracle survive the competition from the existing grasses would quickly succoumb to the heavy wear and tear from machinery and foot traffic the green is about to endure for the next 6 months.

Top-dressing should be avoided for all of the reasons detailed elsewhere on the site (see here), but also because applying a sandy top-dressing at this time will cause the following additional problems:

1. blunt mowers
2. sand pick up on bowls and scratched bowls
3. damage to grass plants from abrasion and blunt mower blades

So there’s an easy time and money saver for today…more on top-dressing here.