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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.

5 little known facts about creating a Performance Bowls Green

  1. Top dressing is counter productive to producing a Performance Bowling Green
  2. Following the Performance Bowls Green system reduces maintenance costs from day 1.
  3. Doing too much work on your green can be detrimental to its condition.
  4. The performance greens program has the long term effect of reducing the work needed on the green.
  5. Performance bowls greens can be maintained with zero pesticides, another saving.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.