Category: Greenkeeping

July 8, 2023

Grass, greenkeepers and the soil food web

The soil food web has become an increasingly popular term in greenkeeping and bowling green management. The problem-solution-problem, or symptoms approach to greenkeeping has been exposed as fundamentally flawed by the diminishing list of available pesticides now available to turf managers. Is there a better way to manage greens...yes. And the extraordinary discovery is that a greenkeeping program that focusses on the green as an eco-system is fully compatible with producing tight, natural turf dominated by the fine perennial Fescue and Bent grasses.

July 7, 2023

Sweat the small stuff, for a high performance bowling green this year

If your green maintenance budget was cut in half this year what would you do?

Most clubs when faced with cuts to the greenkeeping budget, will try at all costs to keep the most important work in the plan. Unfortunately, important frequently gets confused with dramatic, which means that the big expense of top-dressing in the spring and autumn usually stays in the plan and I wish it didn’t for all the reasons I’ve explained over many articles.

Meantime, the work deemed less important and which of course is less dramatic is often sidelined or dropped as a result of a fear of what might go wrong if the big, sexy stuff is missed. These big jobs “must be doing a lot of good”, or so the thinking goes, because they’re so expensive and disruptive?

July 6, 2023

Bowling green nutrition, how it works

We are familiar with the concept of our grass plants being composed mostly of water (75-85%), but what else is in a grass plant? The answer is that the dry matter of the plant is made up of a mix of 16 elements, commonly referred to as the essential nutrients. We describe them as essential because the plant can't exist or complete its life cycle if any of these nutrients are lacking to any great degree.

June 17, 2023

How Wetting Agents Work

The re-wetting effect will last as long as sufficient wetting agent remains bonded to the sand particles, but water repellency and the associated dry patches will return when this is no longer the case. That is why it is important to work on the soil eco-system as a whole to effect a cure for the underlying issues of imbalance brought about by excess sand and the routine use of inorganic fertilisers and fungicides over decades.

June 3, 2023

Turf Grass Texture. Performance Evaluation of the Bowling Green Part 4.

In part 4 of our series on the Performance Evaluation of the Bowling Green we move on to examining turf texture. Texture is closely tied in to some of the other aspects of Bowling Green Performance we have looked at so far in this series. Texture is one aspect of turf management that the greenkeeper can influence greatly, but seems so simple that it is often overlooked.