Compost Tea is a home made spray that is applied to fine turf to increase the micro life in the soil. It reintroduces missing microbes and boosts the populations of all of the main beneficial microbe groups such as bacteria, protozoa and the all important Fungi. Some of these help to degrade thatch, turning it into valuable humus, giving life and body to the depleted and often excessively sandy soil in many bowling greens.
Life after pesticides for bowling clubs, what a scary thought, or is it? Master Greenkeeper John Quinn explains why he believes the death of pesticides could be the start of a revolution in bowling green performance.
A beautifully made film that explains how our turf grasses can interact with soil bacteria and fungi to build the perfect, disease free bowling green eco-system if only we’d let them.
So how can you make 2019 the year you finally make a start on this process at your green?
Watch the video then start the process here.
Other articles related to this:
Compost Tea, what is it and what can it do for your green?
Poa annua to fine grass transition
Localised Dry Patch typically rears its ugly head in June in the UK, but by then it is way too late to do anything about it. Once your green is displaying the large brown patches of desiccated grass and powder dry soil beneath, no amount of watering or wetting agent will bring it back fully this year. Now is the time to inspect your green and deal with it permanently.
It's hard to believe that a bowling club could easily save £1800 in greenkeeping costs every year whilst actually improving the green. Do nothing greenkeeping is my name for this phenomenon and I estimate that 98% of UK bowling clubs could benefit from it, starting this year.
The Sweet Spot in greenkeeping is when your green's Physical, Chemical and Biological components come into line to deliver results you couldn't previously have imagined were possible. Hitting that sweet spot is a lot simpler than you might imagine too, as focus on the soil's biology will naturally correct some of the worst Chemical problems and compensate for some of the worst Physical ones. There should be no problem "selling" this idea to your club either as first of all it saves money and secondly it massively improves green performance and consistency.
Turf Performance Evaluation is a based on the observation of a variety of different properties inherent in fine turf grasses, their preferred environmental conditions and growth habits. This article kicks off a series looking at these properties in more detail.
Understanding your greens soil analysis report isn't always at the forefront of thought of those who instigate the soil test. Too often it is merely a fertiliser sales tool with the advice given taking very little notice of the results received.
Greens soil analysis results are often confusing and use terms that are not easily understood in relation to greenkeeping practice. In this article, John sets out to change that by taking apart a typical greens soil analysis report and explaining it in terms we can all understand. More importantly it relates the results to maintenance.
Compost tea is a specially home brewed spray that will boost the microbe population in your bowling green, allowing you to encourage the finer grasses and combat dry patch, disease and thatch, naturally and effectively.
After studying this subject I can say that compost tea is an essential addition to the Performance Bowling Greens Program. Regular use of compost tea can significantly boost soil microbial activity and helps to make better use of fertiliser inputs. Correct formulation of the mixture during brewing will increase the dominance of the fine perennial grasses in the green sward.
By using compost teas, greenkeepers can reverse decades of damage caused by inorganic fertilisers, pesticides and excessive sand top-dressing.
Last time, I introduced the subject of Disturbance in bowling green ecology and maintenance. I finished by posing the question; How can we use disturbance theory to our advantage in our quest to create a Performance Bowling Green?
To answer that, let’s look at what might constitute Disturbance in the average bowling green. As greenkeepers we actually have an impressive amount of potential influence we can bring to bear on the turf environment; some good and some bad. We can think of these influences as pressures and by applying them with the right force we can manipulate the bowling green eco system (to some degree) to our advantage.
Last time we also discussed Stress factors, which when compared with physical disturbance from our machinery and bowling, can seem innocuous, but the overall affect of say LDP can easily be more damaging to our turf in the long term than an obvious physical disturbance like hollow tining.
Every day Greenkeeping and bowling can have a high disturbance value and put the very grass we are tending under a lot of stress. Mowing, verti-cutting, wear from bowling, pests, diseases, disorders, aeration, top dressing, water and nutrient availability and soil pH can all cause stress to a greater or lesser degree and this will change depending on grass species, general green condition, weather and soil type/condition.
Well the answer is clear then isn’t it? Maybe if we just do nothing (which is the right thing sometimes) the green will improve on its own. If we had unlimited time and didn’t need the green to be prepared for bowling, then I would say absolutely yes, leave it alone, bar maybe a sheep or two and it would sort itself out easily. There would be no thatch, compaction or LDP either. But we don’t have that luxury so we need to intervene to get our green in the shape we want, especially if our green has been subjected to what has become conventional or traditional greenkeeping.
The transition from a failing green that is deep in the grip of the Circle of Decline to the Nirvana that is a Performance Bowling Green is something that needs a fair deal of skill and a great deal of patience and consistency of approach. Once we are in utopia with a Performance Bowling Green we can start to think of backing off on the heavy, physical maintenance and begin to implement a low disturbance diet.
Once we have reversed the process of decline the bowling green can and will improve quickly, but it’s at this time that we need to exercise caution and stick with the program, avoiding slipping back into the old patterns of maintenance at all costs.
At that stage we can start to use the stresses of disturbance to our advantage. The plan is to create a healthy, settled green first and then put the thumb screws on the undesirables like annual meadow grass slowly but surely, all the time making sure that the techniques and intensity of maintenance we use don”t put the bent and fescue component of the sward under undue stress.
Disturbance can be used to get the ball rolling on green transition from 100% annual meadow-grass turf with squidgy, thick thatch at the turf base over a claggy clay soil. The first steps would include making sure there is physical drainage to take away excess water.
The program would then move on to the renovation phase which would start with aggressive compaction relief. Then a series of operations to physically remove thatch would follow and this could include, intensive core aeration, deep slotting/scarification and maybe even top dressing with sand (yes you read that correctly) if the conditions demanded it.
When in the grip of the Circle of Decline, greens in this condition usually need a high Nitrogen input just to tease a result out of them for play, so the fertiliser program will definitely need a revisit to reduce this. Watering will usually be too high also so we have to tweak and jiggle the program a little at a time in order to maintain grass cover during this major transition.
Finer surface aeration like verti-cutting will be intensified as will sarrell rollling and it will become increasingly important to keep the mower razor sharp with zero contact blade settings to maintain the health of the turf plants.
In Performance Bowling Greens I split the recovery and on going delivery of performance into 3 distinct programs of work that may or may not be used in parallel depending on the overall condition of the green in question. These are Baseline Maintenance, Renovation Maintenance and Performance Maintenance, leading to phase known as Continuous Improvement
The process of transition from a predominantly annual meadow grass, thatchy, compact and anaerobic, sickly green to a Performance Bowling Green is detailed in my eBook Performance Bowling Greens below:
