- Top dressing is counter productive to producing a Performance Bowling Green
- Following the Performance Bowls Green system reduces maintenance costs from day 1.
- Doing too much work on your green can be detrimental to its condition.
- The performance greens program has the long term effect of reducing the work needed on the green.
- Performance bowls greens can be maintained with zero pesticides, another saving.
Category: Greenkeeping
Preventative fungicide
The agronomic advice received by many clubs with regard to winter maintenance is just wrong and no where is this more prevalent than in the advice given about fungal disease prevention.
A healthy, living soil contains many different types of fungi and only a few of them are potentially harmful to the green.
If the green and soil are maintained in a healthy condition, even the potentially harmful fungal pathogens like fusarium, take all patch, dollar spot, anthracnose etc, although probably still present, pose no real threat to the turf.
The soil under your green when in its natural state is a little eco-system all of its own and the balance of this eco-system is easily destroyed by clumsy maintenance practices.
Soil micro-organisms and all manner of beneficial fungi need to thrive under there to make your green work the way it should i.e. to a high standard with the minimum of chemical intervention. Beneficial soil fungi actually work with grass plants to help them take up essential nutrition from the soil.
For this reason, even a green that is knackered and at the very beginning of the Performance Greens turnaround process should not be subjected to blanket applications of any fungicide.
This is because broad spectrum fungicides are pretty blunt instruments and don’t differentiate between good and bad fungi, meaning that every blanket application is essentially turning your green away from the door at the Performance Greens Annual Dance!
The whole process of decline in greens due to “traditional” maintenance is detailed here.
The recovery process is outlined here.
One reader told me of his recent bill for fungicide totalling over £800; for a tiny fracftion of that money you can get yourself a map out of this madness here.
5 warning signs that your bowls green is dying
Many bowls greens have problems; its rare for a season to go by with only praise for the green from members.
The majority of the problems encountered on bowls greens is directly attributable to the maintenance the green gets and the in particular the maintenance it has had over the years, especially the last 4 decades.
This is due in large part to the traditions that have taken hold in bowls green keeping that are wholly inappropriate to maintaining the green in a state of high performance.
There are many warning signs that your green is suffering but these 5 are the main ones that you should be aware of:
- Foot prints on the bowls green surface; if you regularly leave indentations with your feet on the green surface this is a sign that there is too much thatch building up. Thatch inhibits health by reducing access for oxygen into the green surface. Thatch also harbours fungal disease spores and can be a precursor to severe localised dry patch outbreaks.
- Yellowing leaves on grass plants; this is another sign that all is not well with the health of your bowls green and the soil underlying it. Yellowing or chloritic grass plants means that the turf is suffering from a lack of essential nutrients, or that the soil is lacking oxygen which is essential for the encouragement of beneficial soil microbes. There are many other reasons that grass plants could exhibit yellowing leaves, including fungal diseases but all of the possible reasons point to underlying problems with the green’s turf/soil relationship.
- The bowls green surface is unpredictable to play on; when a bowls green is unpredictable to play on from day to day or from rink to rink; sometimes slow, sometimes fast and with quirky draws this is a sign of underlying problems which could include localised dry patch, excessive thatch and compaction.
- Green surface looks patchy; again a patchy looking green, which has varying degrees of turf density, bare patches, weeds, moss or other grasses is usually suffering from a lack of soil oxygen and a low soil microbe population.
- Puddles on green surface after rain; this can be caused by excessive thatch, compaction or localised dry patch which causes the green surface to become hydrophobic or water repellent.
Problems such as these cannot and should not be dealt with on a piecemeal basis. All of these problems are simply symptoms of underlying issues. The decline of bowls greens is described in detail here and the answer to the problem is detailed here.
How to end poor bowls green performance
A very large number of bowls greens in the UK have problems with performance and surface predictability.
It’s quite common for the bowls green to be praised as the best ever one week, only to to be un-recognisable as the same green the next.
Many times this is blamed on the weather or the greenkeeper or both, but the fact is that the majority of greens are already in poor condition due to decades of inappropriate maintenance.
This article explains this problem in more detail and this eBook holds the key to ending
this frustration permanently.
How to harness nature to achieve a performance bowls green
In Performance Bowls Greens, a practical guide there is a simple but detailed procedure for getting back to natural greenkeeping, reducing maintenance costs and ensuring predictable and affordable long term bowls green performance.
In it John Quinn explains what has gone wrong in UK bowls green maintenance, why we rely on industry norms at our peril and more importantly what we can do about it.
This best selling eBook, breaks down all of the myths and fairy tales about bowls green maintenance including why you shouldn’t be top-dressing your green or following many of the green keeping practices currently deemed essential.
No bowls club can afford to be without this eBook.