Today I would like to introduce the concept of “a target audience”
I deal with this comprehensively in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and it takes a view that the successful bowling clubs of the future will look quite a bit different to the ones we are familiar with today.
The essence of this is that not all of your club’s revenue will come from bowlers and that you will need to set your sights on a much wider range of “customers” within your local community if your club is to thrive.
This is why I have repeatedly used the terms Member, Customer and User; to try to differentiate between the traditional bowling club member and the future mix of customers a club (the word “customer” of course emphasising the need for clubs to think like businesses) will require to focus on if it is to attract and sustain sufficient foot-fall to thrive in the future.
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.
Pre season bowling green fertilising is a key component of the Performance Bowling Green program.
Spring and autumn are the ideal times to make nutritional corrections using granular fertilisers.
During the playing season I recommend that you rely on bio liquid fertilisers applied on a spoon fed basis approximately every 14 days. There is a large range of suitable products available from a variety of manufacturers.
The bio liquid approach to fertilising the green delivers a more consistent growth pattern and the “bio” or carbohydrate component encourages natural decomposition of thatch and release of soil borne nutrients to the plants as and when they need them.
However, the rigours of winter can leave imbalances in the soil due to luxury uptake by the plants of Potassium and the natural leaching processes inherent in the soil.
Due to this it is a good idea to top up the soil with a corrective application of granular fertiliser at this time.
The soil temperature will still be fairly low so the product you use should contain a little quickly available nitrogen (ammonia), as well as a slow release N component. Plants also need a little Phosphorous at this time to aid strong root development, especially if you over-seeded the green in autumn.
The diagram below shows the process that many poorly maintained bowling greens experience over a period of years if 3 basic maintenance issues are not addressed as a priority.
The top 3 issues on all fine turf are:
1. Thatch Control
2. Compaction Control
3. Turf Nutrition
the Circle of Decline, the reason many greens never improve
In addition to the top 3 there are of course other important issues such as irrigation management, topdressing etc, but if these 3 big issues are under-managed then the green will spiral into what I have called the Circle of Decline.
Simply put this is the course of events that go on largely un-noticed by many bowling clubs until it is too late to effect a quick recovery.
A lack of attention to thatch build up (see other posts under the thatch category) results in a thick mat of un-decomposed dead grass shoots, roots and leaves. This mat gradually effects the turf’s ability to put down roots and take up water and nutrients. In advanced cases a root break will occur and Localised Dry Patch is a very common symptom of excessive thatch also (see other posts under the LDP category)
Disease
In winter, thatch can hold water like a sponge and encourage fungal diseases such as fusarium patch to take hold. This sometimes results in over use of chemical fungicides which kill off the disease and many beneficial fungi into the bargain.
Symbiosis
Grass relies on beneficial microbes, such as fungi to make best use of the available nutrition and so begins to have difficulty obtaining the necessary nutrition from the soil.
This often results in over fertilisation, as much of what is applied is not made available to the plants due to the anaerobic conditions which now prevail.
By now conditions are highly favourable to the weed annual meadow grass which is a very shallow rooting species. The finer fescue and bent grasses are compromised and in an effort to keep the meadow grass alive excessive irrigation is required.
This contributes even further to the excessive thatch layer as meadow grass is a prolific producer of thatch and we are back to the beginning of the cycle.
Action must be taken to break into the circle of decline, take action before its too late for your green.
