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Top Dressing Bowling Green

(s)Top Dressing!

Recent summers have seen a lot of greens devastated by Localised Dry Patch a disorder that is rapidly becoming the scourge of Bowling Green Maintenance Specialists and Club Greenkeepers a like.

I make no apology for writing about this once again, because in my opinion this issue has the ability to accelerate the decline of many already shaky clubs.

It is also clear that there is a deep misunderstanding of the issue across the bowling community…how do I know this?

Well, on several occasions over the last week I have been confronted with some of the worst examples of Localised Dry Patch I have seen in 30 years; in some cases there is virtually no grass cover left and the green surfaces are unlikely to hold together until the end of the season, but…

Despite that, I am still coming up against two of the most mind boggling situations time after time:

  1. The first is when I am actually demonstrating Localised Dry Patch in action by removing soil samples from affected greens and showing committee members powder dry soil/sand; and they insist that they think the green needs a good top-dressing!
  2. The second is when I get a phone call or email from a club with the same severe LDP problems who have had a recommendation from an “expert” that they need to top-dress their green to over come the problem.

Listen folks; I know this is turning into a bit of a rant but here are a few bullet points that you must remember if your green and maybe even your club is going to survive:

  1. Localised Dry Patch (LDP) is a soil disorder not a disease so it can’t be reversed over-night by any quick fix method regardless of how convincing the salesman is!
  2. LDP has the capability to ruin your green beyond economical repair.
  3. LDP  is so common because clubs have habitually thrown tonnes of sand based top-dressings at their greens for decades; the tipping point has been reached, many clubs are now trying to produce bowling surfaces with limited budgets on very high sand content soils; it can’t be done!
  4. More sand will only make the problems worse not better.

So what can be done?

Well currently if your green is affected even mildly by LDP and you are in the process of thinking about an autumn program that includes top-dressing with several tonnes of high sand content top-dressing you are not only damaging your green, but you are also wasting hundreds of pounds.

  1. My eBook Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide costs less than a bag of fertiliser, so do your green a favour and just buy a copy…its peanuts compared to what you are about to do otherwise.
  2. In the book there is a clear plan for getting over LDP and moving your green to a consistently high performance surface.
  3. You will save a lot of cash by taking a more natural, less abusive approach to green maintenance.
  4. The savings you make could be what saves your club from going under and your green will be on the road to recovery and consistent high performance into the bargain.

If you decide to ignore this, then please take away one message “Stop Dressing”

Green Surface requirements for high performance.

Performance Greens have specific surface attributes

Following on from yesterdays post on Performance Green Properties, the ideal bowling green then, will be uniform in terms of appearance, pace and consistency of play over the whole green and over the season. We will probably see an increase in pace as the summer progresses, but we shouldn’t see too many fluctuations in this pace during an average season.

This consistency is achievable, but only by first getting the green  into a condition where it has returned to behaving as one living eco system. This means that the green will demonstrate some very specific attributes. Today we will consider the surface properties  of such a green. It will need the following :

Grasses.

The grasses we use to produce the surface will need to demonstrate the following attributes:

  1. Fine leafed with an upright growth habit
  2. Slow re-growth after cutting
  3. Resistance to wear, disease, drought, and cold with a fast recovery rate from wear and damage.
  4. Deep green, uniform colouration

All of the above points us to the finer Bent and Fescue Grasses. So now that we know the kind of surface we need and the kind of grass sward we need in order to achieve this surface we can start to define the ideal growing conditions required by such a sward.

Weeds.

It goes without saying that there should be no weeds in the green surface and by weed I mean any plant life that can disrupt the playing surface. Now, most weeds are obvious because they are broad-leafed and show up in stark contrast to the grass surrounding them. However, there are a few less obvious weeds that can also cause inconsistency on the playing surface such as pearlwort and yarrow and these can sometimes be hard to spot and eradicate, Yellow suckling clover is another difficult weed to deal with.

In addition to the weeds proper referred to above, many greenkeepers who would also consider annual meadow-grass (Poa annua) to be just as bad a weed pest as any dandelion or daisy, but the hard truth is that many greens are so badly infested with this grass that to get rid of it quickly would be to get rid of the majority of the grass sward, leaving the green in a very poor state.

The good news is that the approach required to achieve a performance green outlined in this book will gradually make your green unattractive and unaccommodating to both broad-leafed weeds and weed grasses like annual meadow grass.

Diseases and Disorders

In addition to rogue grasses and weeds the surface can be disrupted by a plethora of different pathogens that directly interact with the grass, usually to its detriment and that of the green surface. These are almost always fungal diseases and some of the more common are fusarium, red-thread and snow mould.

Sometimes confused with diseases are a series of other green defects usually labelled as disorders. These are generally not pathogenic, so don’t directly damage the grass plants, but their effects can be just as devastating to bowling greens. These include slimes and squidge usually associated with acidic soil conditions and the very problematic Localised Dry Patch, associated with thatch, over use of sand and irrigation problems.

Again though, there is nothing to worry about because like we saw with unwanted grasses and weeds in the sward, the conditions required to produce a consistently high performance green will make your green extremely unattractive to these troublesome disorders and diseases.

Green sub-surface requirements for high performance.

The soil we use to support both the structure of the bowling surface and to sustain the grasses required for a high performance surface will require the following attributes:

  1. A strong, stable soil structure that resists compaction and wear.
  2. A healthy, living soil that retains sufficient moisture and nutrients to sustain a healthy sward of fine grass.
  3. A free draining medium able to cope with heavy periods of rain without puddling excessively and which drains quickly after heavy rainfall.

We will keep exploring this and tomorrow I’ll be looking at the sub surface requirements for performance; what goes  on beneath?

Thatch Problems

Rootbreak is a common feature on greens where thatch is out of control

As bowling green maintenance specialists we get lots of questions every week about thatch. So here is a quick crash course on it; what it is, what it does and how to deal with it:

What is it?

Thatch is the name given to the mat of dead roots and shoots that accumulates on the surface of the green. Where moisture, nutrition and cultural practices are optimised for the desired grasses, thatch rarely becomes a problem. However, when soil air content is low, or if drainage is poor and the fertiliser program is not Read more

What bowls green maintenance should be carried out before a game?

Concentrate on minimising lateral grass growth for greater speed and smoothness.

OK, so this is probably a bit late for this year, but keep a note of it for future reference.

This has been a popular question on the site.

The readers who searched on variations of this theme were essentially asking, “What can be done immediately before a game to improve the playing surface?”

Green speed is hampered by excessive thatch build up, which saps some of the momentum of the bowl, so although there isn’t much that can be done about this 5 minutes before the match starts, making thatch reduction and control a major part of the maintenance strategy will help a great deal.

The other major problem in achieving speed is the control of lateral grass growth on the green. This is when grass grows along the ground instead of straight up. The grass plants develop this tendency in order to avoid damage from the mower blades. It’s an evolutionary process; the grass plants that grow this way survive to create more vegetative growth.

So we want to discourage this habit and promote survival of the more upright plants.

To do this we can employ regular grooming, brushing and verti-cutting.

Using the groomer set to 1.5mm above cutting height for the cut immediately before the game will help a lot with this. The groomer attachment on your mower is designed to tease up lateral growth just prior to being cut by the cylinder.

If you don’t have a groomer on your mower you can usually fit a static brush just behind the front roller and this can also do a good job of teasing lateral growth to the upright position prior to cutting if set properly.

Regular verti-cutting will slice through the lateral growth and tease up blades that would otherwise not be cut properly

Eric’s Spiker

 

Eric’s Spiker

Following on from Syd Kennerley’s recent article describing how he converted an old mower into a spiker and Doug Smith’s earlier article about adapting his mower to include a spiker; Eric Barklem from Halton Castle Bowling Club in Westhead near Ormskirk has been inspired to follow Doug’s example and has added a spiker attachment to his Atco mower.

Eric’s machine is a bit different from Doug’s as it uses a cylinder mower where as Doug has adapted a rotary mower.

I asked Eric how he approached the project and he Read more

Protection of Bowls Greens during “Real” Winters

Winter Protection Could be Critical

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the free winter maintenance report at the start of the winter.

Now here we are approaching the Christmas holidays and I don’t think many of you will have been able to implement much of the work that I recommend both in the Winter Maintenance Guide and in Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide.

This is of course due to it being too wintry!

Well the good news is that if you made even a start to the recommended autumn/ winter compaction relief work by getting one or maybe two passes made with the deep slit tiner, then the frost will be doing a lot of good by getting into the soil and heaving it into fissures in the compacted zone.

However, the bad news is two-fold:

  1. it is going to prove difficult to do any work on greens throughout most of the UK this winter due to excessive frost and snow cover on greens; The winter program is essential and if your particular corner of the nation is free of frost and snow you should bash on with the winter work as much as you possibly can.
  2. The worst effect of this excessive cold weather is that the soil temperature is being forced down to levels that we don’t usually have to put up with very often.

This second point is very important and will become increasingly so in the months and years to come.

What’s the problem?

Well, my old Mum has a saying: “We’ve never died a winter yet”, which of course means that we are resilient and can adapt our approach to life to cope with whatever it throws at us.

Is it time to apply this thinking to our bowling greens; do they need further protection from the winter than we currently afford them?

Although I am not advocating a panic buying type situation I do think it is time for us to look at Read more

Performance Bowls Green Maintenance Schedule

A few readers have asked for guidance on what work they should be carrying out on the green on a month to month basis.

Now of course conditions across the UK are widely varied at the moment; some areas in the south are free from frost, whilst here in Perthshire we can have very hard ground and many days of minus temperatures, in the southern parts of the country things can be and often are a lot milder.

When there is frost or snow cover its simply a waiting game; it really is best not to try to remove snow or ice from the green for two reasons:

  1. the damage that could be caused to the turf and soil by actually doing this work.
  2. the snow is affording the turf some protection from the worst of the cold weather; see my article on winter green protection here.

However, after the snow has gone and you start to see a prolonged period of thaw there are a few things you need to look out for as follows: Read more

Problems with Bowls Greens

Yes there are, but they are actually few in number and most of them are symptoms of the big 2.

Fusarium, Localised Dry Patch, Thatch Fungus, Compaction, Spongy Surface, Slow Green, Bumpy Surface, Anthracnose Disease, Dollar Spot, Thatch, Slime, Algae, Fairy Ring, Moss, Leatherjackets, Poor grass growth, Annual Meadow Grass, Weeds, Pearlwort, Angry members, Excessive water costs, etc etc…blah blah blah.

I could go on for a long time with that list.

This is another composite question from the search results on the site this month. About 40 people so far have typed in something like “I’ve got problems on my bowling green”

As regulars know there are only 2 problems on bowling greens; thatch and compaction and everything else is simply a symptom of these two.

So the question should maybe be:

How do bowling greens succumb to thatch and compaction?

Answer: Inappropriate Maintenance Practices.

The Circle of Decline explains this fully.

Performance Bowls Greens and Money Saving

The autumn is traditionally a busy time for bowling green contractors, greenkeepers and club officials as they decide, plan and carry out the autumn renovation works on the green before putting it to bed for the winter.

Now have a look back over that last paragraph; if you didn’t wince at least twice, then it’s possible that you are about to embark on a program of work that will actually harm your green.

It probably won’t be dramatic like the sudden death of your green for ever, but it will probably have a negative impact on the future of your green’s ability to be presented for play consistently well, and maybe even on your club’s chance of survival in these harsh economic conditions.

The points I am referring to are Read more

My Bowls Green is a Disaster what can be done?

Get back to the basics of thatch and compaction control

Here we go with our next web search term that resulted in someone finding this site.

I picked this one today, because it sounds like this search was instigated by someone who really needs help quickly.

This kind of situation calls for a level headed approach. At times like this, when it appears that all is lost and you feel like digging up the green and starting again, it’s easy to Read more