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Category: Greenkeeping

The essential bowling green qualities for high performance…Uniformity

End Game Over the next few weeks I will publish a few articles to help you to evaluate
your turf with an aim to improving its performance over the long term.

Within this series I will demonstrate how it is possible to formulate “a theory of everything” for want of a better name, that can guide us in the right direction if we care to listen and take note for the improvement of turf performance for bowling or sports in general.

Over the series we will see how all of the available methods of evaluation point by and large to the same root causes and that to improve turf performance we actually have to improve turf and soil health.

The first of these qualities is Uniformity which is an estimate of the even appearance of a turf.
High quality turf should be uniform in appearance. The presence of Read more

The shocking truth about bowls green maintenance

When traditions get hold they are somethimes hard to shift and this is no more true than in bowls green maintenance.

Over the past 3 or 4 decades bowls green maintenance has been transformed into a weird science that is designed to baffle greenkeepers into rejecting common sense and observation in favour of bottles and bags of ever more expensive fertilisers, pesticides and conditioners.

Bowls green keeping is essentially very simple and all of our actions and maintenance procedures can either add or detract from the performance of our bowls greens.

A detailed explanation of what has gone wrong is included here and a step by step process
for turning this situation around is included here.

Bowls Green Maintenance during Winter

There has been a flurry of enquiries this week about winter maintenance practices, one of my favourite subjects as regulars will know.

Anyway, although I might not have said it all before click here for a selection of related articles.

There is also an in-depth report on winter maintenance here

Autumn Winter Report
Autumn Winter Report
in depth report detailing the essential maintenance your bowling green needs through the autumn and winter period. INSTANT DOWNLOAD ebook more details
Price: £5.97

Can we really trust the fertiliser trade?

The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that we as greenkeepers are actually part of the massive worldwide agriculture industry.

Very few products or technologies ever see the light of day based purely on the needs of bowling clubs or even the much larger golf segment of the fine turf and sports industry.

No, most of the things we use are direct descendants of agricultural or other industrial  products or at least are supported by agriculture’s huge global enterprise.

Every chemical pesticide we use is a direct copy of a product which has a use in growing crops; every fertiliser product is a result of agricultural research and manufacturing processes; even our mowers are based on a machine originally used for trimming in the massive Victorian carpet and textile industry.

Its very interesting to see as part of this discussion the current and on-going dilemma that faces farming. The burgeoning world population means that we have to grow more and more food on fewer and fewer hectares of ground. This ensures that agriculture will continue to be a cutting edge area of scientific research and that as a result we can look forward to continued and constant enticement to try out a multitude of new products and techniques on our bowls greens in the future.

However, there is one train of thought in agriculture and in society in general that is much closer to the one we need to nurture for the assured excellence of our bowls greens in the future, and that is ecological sustainability.

To accompany this goal of sustainability within agriculture there is a renewed interest in the common sense concept of healthy living soil and that is where we need to start on our road to an excellent,
high performance bowling green.

Incidentally, there is an excellent program on the BBC iplayer that explains the mechanics of soil ecology very well. You can still access it here.