Tag: bowling green maintenance

May 28, 2015

Guest Post-Ultragrooming

Today we have a guest post from Vinny Tarbox of The Grass Group on the subject of Ultragrooming. Over to Vinny:

Why you can’t afford not to be Ultragrooming your Bowling Green

The question of Ultragrooming is becoming much more of a hot topic with the ever increasing need for consistent play, be more environmentally friendly, whilst also high quality and also to trim costs where possible.
Ultragrooming is a process that removes the puffiness and thatch from your green. With regular use it is the pre-eminent solution to help minimize puffiness in both high density creeping bent and Bermuda (warm season areas) grass thereby reducing the scalping and foot-printing that plagues these new grasses. It will remove unsightly seed heads in Poa annua turf with minimal fuss. On newly established greens it can help reduce the ingress of Poa annua by “grabbing” individual Poa plants before they get a chance to take hold. It will produce a superior fine leafed Poa turf stand when used
regularly on Poa dominant greens.

The Advanced Read more

May 22, 2015

Mycorrhizal Fungi; an argument against fungicides.

Today I want to get a little bit deeper into the science of bowling green ecology, but I’m getting a little tired of the Ecology title sequence I stupidly started 9 articles ago. Instead of continuing to label them Ecology 1,2,3…etc, I will give them a tag of their own so that if you’re looking for them on the site you just need to type ecology into the search box.

Mycorrhizal Fungi (mycorrhizae) are specialised fungi that work with our grass plants to form symbiotic relationships with the roots. Most soils contain these fungi and each type has its own peculiar host preference. (i.e., each plant species has a specific species of mycorrhizae that it prefers to work with).

The name comes from the Latin word mycor meaning fungus and rhiza meaning root. “Mycorrhiza” is the singular form and “mycorrhizae” the plural and, in soil science the name refers to the tissue that forms when fungi and roots develop a symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship.

One of the key benefits to our grass Read more

April 5, 2015

Bowls Green Maintenance

A very general title for today’s article, but it reflects the current industry desire for a fix all solution to achieving a good bowling green.

Most clubs are unhappy to some extent with the performance of their bowling greens.

This leads to an open ended search for solutions where the searcher i.e. the bowling club or bowling club management official simply looks for information from whatever source to help with the perennial problem of the bowling green.

If this is you, if you simply don’t know where to start in your quest for the truth about achieving a consistently good bowling green here is my suggested reading in order of importance. You can click on these links for more in depth information:

March 25, 2015

Should a new bowls green sink?

There aren’t many new bowling greens being built these days but of those that are appearing the initial euphoric rush of the members is somewhat dampened when things seem to immediately start going wrong with their shiny new green.

One of the most common occurrences is that the green sinks, causing bumps and kinks on the surface. I’ve witnessed this first hand, usually after drawing up a specification for the construction of the green and then returning to find that the project architect (bowling green construction is quite often just a part of a bigger project involving buildings etc) and/or contractor has “interpreted” or worse “adapted” the construction specification, has adapted the construction program (sequence), has adopted non-approved methods, or has used “alternative” materials.

In reality it’s usually a mixture of all of these and the main reason that this happens is to save money on the overall project and this usually happens because the project has run over budget on one of the other elements such as the clubhouse or car park. So the most important part of the project suffers due to a lack of good management of the project overall.

Typical details of this are:

Purpose built, pre-cast concrete edge/bank sections replaced with wooden batons and concrete blocks to save money.
Rootzone depth adjusted to save on materials.
Rootzone laid in one layer instead of being built up and consolidated after each layer.
Cheaper spec gravel used for drainage layer and trench backfill.
Wooden batons, blocks, tools, sandwich and drink containers, grease cartridges, drainage pipe off-cuts etc being left in the green after construction is complete.

Now, if your new green has started to sink and is causing difficulty for your club, your architect, again, should have retained a percentage of the project total from the main contractor until a maintenance period has elapsed (usually 12 months) and any snagging lists are completed to your satisfaction; this allows time to pass for mistakes to start to show up.

In addition to this, there should also be a warranty period on the construction and it isn’t unreasonable for this to be 5 years on workmanship and materials.

Finally, there is the fact that despite all of the above being dealt with properly and on time, the very nature of a bowling green is that it will start to settle out in various places, but this should be minimal and will require some level of corrective maintenance to put it right and this is the main reason for the 12 month maintenance period being included in contracts of this nature.

July 2, 2013

Slime on bowling green turf

Slime on bowling green turf and squidge are disorders of turf that can be both unsightly and hazardous for players as they can both make the surface slippery.

Although they don’t cause damage to the turf as such, they are signs of underlying problems with your green.

The conditions that attract these disorders to your green are excessively wet and spongy turf, usually due to excessive thatch. The soil will usually also be very acidic as a result of anaerobic soil/turf.

The medium to long term solution is to deal with the thatch and you can get the low down on that here.

Immediate and on-going aeration will help a lot to get the process of recovery started, but this has to be part of a concerted program of work to deal with compaction, thatch and generally poor soil conditions.

The question of liming acidic soil comes occasionally, but this is not recommended as broadcasting of lime on fine turf can lead to immediate outbreaks of fungal disease and in any case it usually isn’t needed.

As soon as you start to get some oxygen back into the soil by relieving compaction and dealing with the wet and usually smelly, anaerobic thatch, the soil will start to “sweeten” again.

However there is one little lime based trick you can use to clear the green of the odd patch of slime to allow a match to go ahead and its detailed here.

The main issue is to start to follow a Performance Greens maintenance program to get over the conditions that caused the problem in the first place.