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Pre Season Bowls Green Fertilising

Pre season bowling green fertilising is a key component of the Performance Bowling Green program.

Spring and autumn are the ideal times to make nutritional corrections using granular fertilisers.

During the playing season I recommend that you rely on bio liquid fertilisers applied on a spoon fed basis approximately every 14 days. There is a large range of suitable products available from a variety of manufacturers.

The bio liquid approach to fertilising the green delivers a more consistent growth pattern and the “bio” or carbohydrate component encourages natural decomposition of thatch and release of soil borne nutrients to the plants as and when they need them.

However, the rigours of winter can leave imbalances in the soil due to luxury uptake by the plants of Potassium and the natural leaching processes inherent in the soil.

Due to this it is a good idea to top up the soil with a corrective application of granular fertiliser at this time.

The soil temperature will still be fairly low so the product you use should contain a little quickly available nitrogen (ammonia), as well as a slow release N component. Plants also need a little Phosphorous at this time to aid strong root development, especially if you over-seeded the green in autumn.

More articles on nutrition here.

Pre Season Mowing Program

There is more to mowing than meets the eye

Whatever the season, mowing remains the most important job in the maintenance of a Performance Bowling Green.

Often overlooked due to the everyday nature of the task, there is a lot more to mowing than meets the eye. It is particularly important to follow the correct mowing regime to ensure green consistency and speed. More detailed information on green speed and consistency here.

At this time of year in the run up to the new season, it’s especially important that we get the mowing program right.

During the winter the green surface should have been maintained at a mowing height of around 8mm. In very cold winters, you will see some recession in height and this is difficult to avoid. However, in mild winters, like the one most of us have had this year it is quite normal for the green to keep growing throughout the winter months and this growth needs to be kept in check to minimise the outbreak of diseases and other problems associated with lush winter turf.

Now that the new bowling season beckons we need to gradually lower the cutting height and I would suggest taking it down to around 7mm this month, aiming for 6mm by opening day and 5mm by the end of May, all dependent on soil temperature and prevailing weather; we can still be in the grip of icy cold winds at Easter.

Mowing frequency will be dictated largely by growth rate, but once a week now should be the minimum, bearing in mind that you don’t want to be removing more than a third of the leaf at any one time. So, if the green is growing vigorously, then more frequent mowing will be required.

Of course its tempting to keep the work to a minimum, but mowing will also help to lightly roll the green surface, so it might be beneficial to mow more frequently than is actually required.

The most important factor in mowing is ensuring that the mower is razor sharp and that there is zero contact between the blade and cylinder to give the cleanest and least damaging cut to the grass leaf. More detailed information on mowing can be found here.

Tomorrow we will look more closely at the pre-season renovation work required on the green, with a look at some do’s and don’t’s.

Why has our bowls green become slippery?

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

Bowls Green Maintenance and elephants

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.

Bowls Green Maintenance Basics-Green Speed

There are some less than obvious essentials required to achieve consistently agreeable Green Speed

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

Greenkeeping Advice Leads to Disaster

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.