This week I thought I would take some time out to address some of the questions that have led site visitors here from the search engines. We did this for a week last autumn and it was very successful with a lot of good feedback from readers.
The first one stood out to me as it seems to be a very common issue around the country and is really very simple to fix. We have a had a variety of different questions centred on greens becoming slippery.
This can happen for a variety of Read more
In the early part of the season no growth means no recovery from last winter’s damage, bare areas not filling in with new grass, bumps, hollows and all sorts of other problems mostly related to surface smoothness and consistency.
I’ve heard more than my fair share of strange reasons in bowling green maintenance circles when there is a lack of growth. These mostly centre on almost every bowling green maintenance practice except the one that matters…why?
Well the one that matters is “Irrigation” and it’s still a big taboo in a lot of clubs and in bowling green maintenance circles; it’s “the elephant in the room” to use one of the most annoying buzz phrases in recent times! However the elephant in the room description is a good one in this case; it’s this big, obvious thing in the room or in the conversation, but nobody mentions it!
One club I met with told me they have an “anti-watering brigade” in their club! Can you believe that, a group of members who are actively against watering the green regardless of how much it needs it?
On a well known bowling forum which shall remain nameless here, a contributor added his tuppence to the discussion on irrigation by “boasting” that they never water their green, as if it was some impressive badge to be worn. Another says that watering 3 times a day is crazy (as suggested by another contributor), even though he has no information to tell him the quantity of water being applied or thinking behind the plan.
We really must get over this folks or there will be a lot of very poor bowling green surfaces next year.
The great debate about green speed has raged on since the beginning of the game. But what are the factors known to affect green speed?
In order of their impact on green speed these are the top 7 factors that you should bear in mind. Obviously there are others such as weather patterns, level of play etc, but these are largely out of the greenkeepers control and in any case do not figure highly in green speed management.
Thatch Layer Control and Management; this means knowing the thatch levels on your green and having a feel for how quickly thatch builds up at each point in the year.
Typically thatch will be much quicker to build up in the main growing season and it can easily take greenkeepers by surprise if they don’t keep a watchful eye on the situation.
Reducing a troublesome thatch layer significantly is a job best left for the autumn when severe measures can more safely be taken, but following the Performance Greens program will ensure that you are minimising the occurrence of new thatch through the production and maintenance of a healthy living rootzone and turf.
You can find more in-depth articles on thatch here.
Compaction Control and Relief; Second only to thatch in causing green problems, Compaction is a Read more
Bowling green irrigation or watering is often mis-understood and as a result is often managed insufficiently to ensure that the green performs to its highest standards.
The first thing is to make sure of, is that you are applying enough water every week and that means trying as best you can to keep a record of any rainfall and irrigation that is going onto the green.
Making irrigation management a priority in your bowling green maintenance program is crucial because in a typical dry week your green will lose the equivalent of 25mm of moisture through evaporation from the soil and transpiration from the grass plants ; please remember that this varies considerably around the country and will depend on things like temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation and of course your bowling green maintenance program.
This means that you should be aiming to get at least that amount back on.
In Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide I go into detail about Soil Moisture Deficit and how to keep a water balance sheet for the most accurate and efficient way to manage irrigation and that is a really good method to use to get this right.
However, bowling green maintenance at the height of the summer relies a lot on feel for the soil as well and although I would always try to maintain a manageable Soil Moisture Deficit to encourage deeper rooting etc, it is more important right now to get on sufficient water to ensure your green plays consistently and to keep localised dry patch under control or hopefully at bay.
This means you should be aiming to get 25mm of water on in any dry week, making allowances for any rainfall you have had by reducing that amount accordingly.
The most common pump and sprinkler set ups for bowling green maintenance from most of the major irrigation manufacturers will put out approximately 1mm of water for each 2 minutes of system run time.
This means that you need to run the system for 2 minutes per head to replace 1mm of water lost. Remember that is “per head”.
So for a 25mm watering you need to run the system for 50 minutes per head during a 7 day period.
The most effective way to do this is to get this water on in as few applications as possible. Try to aim for 25mm over 3 nights. This is much more effective and makes much better use of precious water than 7 light applications where much of the water is lost to evaporation in the morning.
In my Bowling Green Maintenance book: Performance Greens, a practical guide I go into this subject in quite a bit of detail and lay out a plan that you can use to manage irrigation more effectively.
Someone searched by this term on the web and was directed to the site.
Now I normally pick out the most popular search terms to try to answer the underlying question, but this was a single and very different search term and I thought it was very interesting.
The title tells the full story; someone is of the opinion that the greenkeeping advice they received caused the opposite result from the one they expected.
This is probably due to one of two common problems; both of which I tease out and put a bit of detail on in the opening section of my eBook Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide:
Problem Number 1. A lot of the advice that is available is non-committal, playing it safe or just wrong; for example a lot of “advisers” still peddle the same old advice which usually includes some of the most damaging practices you can inflict on a bowling green like top-dressing with high sand content top-dressing.
Problem Number 2. Bowling clubs have a high degree of impatience when it comes to waiting for improvements to materialise on their green. Even when following the correct regime there is usually a period of renovation required to get things moving in the right direction and this is why many greens never improve to any great degree; clubs don’t stick to a plan.
Now this is understandable to a degree because most club members quite rightly want a good green…now; they are paying their membership now, so now is when thy want results. This leads to desperation mode, another factor that creeps into clubs from time to time and again detailed in Performance Bowling Greens.
This is so common that many of you who have read the eBook have written to say that they recognised their own club in the examples I gave.
So when someone says that the advice they have received has caused a disaster its usually due to one of these problems.
