One of the easiest, cheapest and effective methods of killing moss in turf is to apply Ferrous Sulphate. Therefore, on Bowls Central, I could sell many tonnes of Ferrous Sulphate at a nice profit margin every year by simply pandering to conventional thinking, but you won't find any for sale here. Let me explain why:
Tag: Circle of Decline
How to end poor bowls green performance
A very large number of bowls greens in the UK have problems with performance and surface predictability.
It’s quite common for the bowls green to be praised as the best ever one week, only to to be un-recognisable as the same green the next.
Many times this is blamed on the weather or the greenkeeper or both, but the fact is that the majority of greens are already in poor condition due to decades of inappropriate maintenance.
This article explains this problem in more detail and this eBook holds the key to ending
this frustration permanently.
Noxious Chemicals and Performance Bowls Greens
The English language has a habit of dressing things up to make them more palatable.
I wonder if meat would be so popular if we called beef, lamb and pork “dead cow”, “baby sheep” or “pig carcass”.
Sometimes of course if something is particularly hard to swallow we have to resort to French; I don’t think even the big 4 banks could sell many “death pledges” regardless of how desperate we were to get on the property ladder!
However, I have decided not to play along when it comes to producing Performance Bowling Greens and I now lump herbicides, insecticides and fungicides (pesticides) into my newly coined phrase “noxious chemicals”.
So it might come as some surprise that I am now going to advocate the continued use of these products.
The long term plan for any bowling green should be to wean it off of these products, but I still come across clubs who jump in with both feet too early and make their green even worse than it was.
Although done with the best of intentions, this can torpedo the whole program as members rebel against the new program.
If you have a thatchy, compacted, sour smelling green, you will need pesticides for the foreseeable future. However, the plan should be to move to spot treatment only whilst you undertake the real work of aeration and soil improvement.
Eventually, you can become smug like me and call them noxious chemicals, the use of which will never be entertained again.
Maybe we will eventually promote the opening day BBQ with a poster covered in dead baby animals!
Much more info on weaning your green off pesticides here.
What does top dressing a bowls green do?
In spite of the common misconception that it does a lot of good and that it is an essential part of annual bowling green maintenance, in broad terms it does very little of good towards levelling the surface, drains club’s of much needed cash and actually causes untold damage to the green eco-system over time.
There are many more articles detailing the reasons for this conclusion here.