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Performance Bowls Greens-the 4 biggest obstacles to success

When I set out to write my book, Performance Bowling Greens, it made me think about the main obstacles to success encountered by many of the bowling clubs I visit and in many ways it comes down to what can only be described as Common Sense versus Commerce. The 4 biggest obstacles I encounter again and again are as follows:

  1. Desperation Mode; or a state of mind that permeates a club when nothing they do seems to yield the results they crave.
  2. Lack of Consistency; which is direct result of the 1st obstacle, and is when the club repeatedly changes its approach to maintenance because it basically has no faith in any of the maintenance models it encounters.
  3. Tradition; although a lot of the traditions in question are not that old.
  4. Greenkeeping Myths.

The reasons for the problems I have just mentioned are mainly to do with the need that exists in every
industry to have companies or people who can supply materials and equipment in order for the work of that industry (in our case greenkeeping) to go ahead. So you see as greenkeepers or bowling clubs we are part of a commercial chain that needs constant lubrication in order to keep going.  The end result of that process is the pressure put on all of us to try new things, new machines, new fertilisers, new chemicals etc. And of course this isn’t a bad thing in itself, because if it wasn’t for this continual process we wouldn’t have any of the tools we need to continue maintaining our green. The trouble comes when laymen or greenkeepers lacking confidence in their abilities are constantly bombarded with new “stuff” by “experts”. This leads to “new traditions” which lead to a lack of consistency, which leads to poor results, which leads to desperation for a solution and desperate people are willing to believe anything, so even myths can take on the appearance of common sense.

In Performance Bowling Greens I will be detailing a more measured and calm approach to bowling green maintenance based on scientific fact, a deep understanding of nature and the interaction between turfgrass and soil. An approach, in fact a full program you can follow to ensure that your green performs to a very high standard at a reasonable cost.

And its there that we will pick up the story tomorrow, as I will be looking at how heavily the future of bowling depends on the ability of clubs like yours to deliver consistent high performance on what can only be described as a shoestring budget.

You can get your copy of Performance Bowling Greens here. Meantime I’ll will be back tomorrow with more news.

Performance Bowls Greens the key to Bowls Club Survival

The quality and consistency of the playing surface on your green and your club’s chances of long term survival are inextricably linked, why?

Well if we consider the sport of bowls as a business for a minute it is clear, at least in the UK , that there is a vast over supply in the bowling marketplace. There simply isn’t enough demand for bowling to sustain the sheer volume of clubs that currently exist. The reasons for this are manifold and include some really “deep” factors which economists and sociologists might describe as, well… socio-economic, but the most important thing for bowling clubs to consider is that there simply aren’t enough bowlers around to make every UK bowling club economically sustainable. In other words some, maybe many, clubs will perish  in the years to come.

Of course, there are big picture issues that can be addressed and might help to improve the uptake of the game, like for instance the way bowls is marketed, and the general image of the game, perhaps more TV coverage of tournaments would help. All of that is big stuff, that can and will take a long time to bear fruit.

Meantime, if we come back to the close up view, the view out of your clubhouse window in fact, we can all start to do something this year to give our own club the greatest chance of survival; and that is tocommit to providing our members, visitors and prospective members with the best green possible to play on. This one thing is, in my opinion,  the key to growing the game again from the ground up in the years to come.

The 2 greatest barriers to the average bowling club making such a commitment are :

  1. the perceived cost and…
  2. the perceived difficulty associated with such a plan.

The key word here is “perceived” and there is good reason for that as we saw yesterday when we looked at inconsistency, traditions, desperation mode and greenkeeping myths all of which add to the perception of great expense.

If you’ve been reading my posts this week you will know that my new book Performance Bowling Greens is due to be released on this site on Monday 15th February and my major impetus for sitting down to write the book in the first place was to banish the notion that Performance Bowling Greens are prohibitively expensive and/or difficult to produce consistently.

In Performance Bowling Greens I detail a no-nonsense blueprint that you can follow to get the ultimate Performance from your Bowling Green. This really is a break with tradition (and if you read my post yesterday you will know the truth behind tradition) and a re-evaluation of how Performance Bowling Greens actually work. The book dispels all of the commonly accepted Greenkeeping Myths and moves straight to the program you must follow to achieve the highest level of performance and consistency from your green. Above all I have written the book in a way that will give you the confidence to just get on and do it.

Yesterday I shared with you my thoughts on the main reasons that clubs fall into the cycle of inconsistency and therefore perpetual disappointment with their greens. Today I would like to re-stress just how important it is that your club starts to follow a structured improvement plan aimed at producing a high performance green consistently over the long term.

When you pick up your copy of Performance Bowling Greens next Monday you will have a step by step blueprint that you can follow to turn your green around for good and start to enjoy the extra security such a green will provide for your club. The most important aspect of the book is that it details an approach that any club can take and in almost every case, it won’t only improve the green’s performance dramatically but will also return a significant financial saving to the club.

I will share a typical bowling club story with you and if you don’t recognise your own club within the story its possible that you already have a high performance bowling green.

Remember you can get your copy of Performance Bowling Greens in the shop

Understanding your target audience

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.

Of course, people won’t be conveniently Read more

Achieving Excellence on a Budget

There can be little doubt that the green is one of the most important assets of any bowling club. It would seem obvious therefore that this is where the pursuit of excellence should begin for any club.  What is not so obvious, however is that the green is also where the greatest  savings can be made. It’s all about working smarter and not blindly following greenkeeping traditions that have prevailed in bowling for decades and which don’t always add value to the club or improve the green. Please browse this site to find out how you can optimise your green maintenance and ensure you are getting the best value for your budget.

Annual Meadowgrass

Poa annua ad infinitum

Yes I’ve come over all Latin today; and no, it’s not because I can’t believe my old jeep sailed through its MOT yet again last week!

Even the garage owner was amazed that he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

He sent me off with “I’ll get you next year!”

No, the Latin was inspired by a photo I received from a regular reader who sent it in to illustrate a problem he had on his green with red-thread.

However, the reason for this post is not to discuss Latin, or Red-Thread for that matter.

The clump of grass in the centre of the photo is annual meadow grass, or Poa annua to use its botanic name.

It’s not that we greenkeepers are more cultured than the average man in the street, more to do with college lecturers who insisted that we learned to identify and remember the botanic names for hundreds of grasses, trees, shrubs and weeds.

Incidentally this came in useful when I was leaving the MOT station, as I casually threw in a final, killer comment of “you need to get your Tarixicum officianale (dandelion) sprayed before it takes over the yard!”

Back to the clump of meadow grass.

This is actually a weed ( an unwanted plant in its current state and location) as we are really trying to create and maintain a sward of finer fescue and bent grasses for the best bowling surfaces.

Unfortunately, almost (probably all) all of the bowling greens in the UK will be infested with this grass.

Even newly built greens constructed on sterile rootzone material will show signs of this weed within 2 years as its seed blows in from the surrounding area.

From the picture you can see it at its worst aesthetically, which it usually is at this time of year. Right through May and June it will show up as unsightly clumps of lime green grass which contrasts vividly with the other darker green species.

Also at this time it will be seeding like mad.

The visual problem recedes as the summer progresses, but it does actually produce seed all year round.

Scarifying, verti-cutting and close mowing are of minimal value in removing the seed heads and to some extent can actually help annual meadow grass to thrive in the summer.

This is because it has a very low and prostrate growth habit which keeps the majority of the plant including seed heads below the cutting blades.

Excessive scarification and verti-cutting can actually weaken the finer fescue grass leaving the annual meadow grass with a stronger chance of survival.

It does have one Achilles heel and that is water.

Poa annua is a very shallow rooting grass and the Performance Greens program is designed to allow greenkeepers to keep the surface of their greens a little drier than most, thus putting the weed grass under pressure.

This is achieved by managing irrigation to ensure that the green is watered deeply, but irregularly which also has the effect of encouraging deeper rooting of the finer, desirable grasses.

The program also calls for a more sensible approach to cutting heights, whilst using other methods to achieve green speed. This allows the finer grasses to put down even deeper roots and also strengthens plants against drought and wear.

Poa annua is however likely to be with us ad infinitum as it is a very adaptable grass.

This adaptability is actually a good thing in the end as over time the grass becomes finer and blends in more readily with the finer grasses.

It is perfectly feasible still, however, to have a green that is predominantly fine and to keep Poa annua under control over the long term by following a sensible program that encourages the development of a healthy living soil which in turn will support a strong and dense sward of finer grass.

Bowls green maintenance schedule

A lot of the web searches that lead people to this site are based around a desire to find a catch all, fool proof, guaranteed to work, easy to implement Bowls Green Maintenance Schedule.

Quite a lot of people actually search using the term: “Cheat Sheet for Bowling Green Maintenance”, and although the assumption would be that this is going to be impossible to find, it’s actually more credible a desire than you might imagine.

Perceived wisdom in the greenkeeping world would insist that the answer to this quest should begin with the phrase “well every green is different, so there is no such thing as a one stop shop for bowling green improvement”. Does that sound like a salesman speaking to you? Yes? Well that’s because it usually is!

However, this isn’t necessarily true.

The fact is that a very large percentage of the people who use this site, or who I meet or talk to about bowling greens, express almost identical problems with their greens and the reason for that is two-fold:

  1.  There are actually very few things that can go wrong with greens; the majority of “problems” merely arise as symptoms of one or two basic underlying issues, which in turn, are related to bad maintenance practices.
  2. Almost every sub-standard or un-predictable bowling green surface is a result of clubs following the “industry standard” of greenkeeping which is dangerously flawed.

So what is the big answer?

Well, although it is really Read more

Circle of Improvement

My post yesterday looked at the huge extent to which the top 100mm (4inches) of our greens have been subjected to sand over the previous 3 or 4 decades.

Today I’d like to elaborate a little on my thinking about taking a green from that state to one of High Performance.

The recovery process is based on encouraging that same top 100mm to return to a state that is akin to a natural, healthy living soil. This of course takes time as we are actually waiting for nature to produce more organic matter to ameliorate the sand to bring the soil back to a state where it can support a large, thriving population of soil microbes.

If you imagine my sketch of the “Circle of Decline” as a water wheel spinning fiercely in a clockwise direction; in other words out of control due to inappropriate maintenance. Each application of sand, pesticide, excessive N fertiliser, etc only serves to set the wheel spinning ever faster in the wrong direction.

The performance greens program is aiming to make the wheel turn in the opposite direction so a lot of the effort at the beginning is simply to slow the wheel down gradually until it is eventually stopped. The program then needs to get the wheel to start turning in the other direction.

Once it starts to turn in the right direction every bit of the correct maintenance program just makes it go faster and faster, so although the recovery process is slow at first, it builds very quickly once things are turned around.

We then start to see the action of what I am going to call the Circle of Improvement due to lack of imagination!

Every ounce of new Read more

Cut Costs and Improve Performance in Bowls Green Maintenance

Sounds unlikely doesn’t it?

The fact is that many clubs could save between £750 and £1000 in the coming month and would actively be improving their green. You know by now what I am talking about if you are regular reader.

Incidentally, welcome to all of our new readers this month!

On most greens the addition of any more sand based top-dressing is actually harmful. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all greens, just most of them.

Leaving this out of the program will result in big savings in the region of those mentioned above.

Next, a prevalent practice used in our industry Read more

Doing Nothing vs Trojan Horses

With the end of the bowling season in clear sight, many clubs will have acquired a familiar temporary feature over by the roadside hedge somewhere. If you look closely there will probably be a pallet or five of bagged top-dressing, ready to go on the green as part of the autumn renovation program.

The bags might be plain or they might be covered in text and graphics proclaiming all of the benefits for your turf that are held within.

They are essentially Trojan Horses, in that they appear to be bearing good news and gifts, but they are actually full of sand (up to 90%) and represent the continued insistence of many clubs and consultants to pursue a program of desertification of bowling greens in the UK.

When your green was first constructed, it probably had an 8-10” (200-250mm) deep layer of topsoil (rootzone). An average bulk density for topsoil would be around 1.6 tonnes/m3. If we say that the average green is 36m X 36m we get an area of 1296m2. The volume of soil required to fill this is calculated thus:

 1296 X 0.25 = 324m3

Using our bulk density average of 1.6 we can calculate weight of soil required as follows:

324 X 1.6 = 518 Tonnes. So our average green was built using approximately 518 tonnes of topsoil.

Most hollow tining operations can penetrate the soil to 4 inches (100mm) and this is usually used in conjunction with top-dressing. This then means that top-dressing operations have been concentrated on about 40% of the actual soil used to build the green (the top 4 inches). 40% of 518 tonnes is 207 tonnes.

30 years of top-dressing with 5 tonnes of material each time is equal to applying 150 tonnes of highly sandy material and this disregards the soil being removed by the hollow tiner! This also assumes that your club only jumped on the train to la la land in the 1980’s; many have been at it for at least a decade before that. I also know of some greens where they are routinely throwing 10 tonnes of straight sand on every year, so these figures are only averages and are probably leaning towards the less crazy end of the spectrum.

Is it any wonder then that greens suffer from localised dry patch, excessive thatch build up, powder dry inert soil, compaction, disease, low microbe populations etc, when almost all of the top 4 inches of the green has been replaced by sand?

If this is the plan for your club this autumn it would be better for your green, if you just do nothing. Yes, even neglecting the green and failing to undertake any autumn renovation would be much less harmful to the long term health and performance of the green than following this program.

Growth Habit and its effect on turf performance

Agrostis stolonifera 

The grasses we use to produce fine turf playing surfaces fall into 2 main categories in relation to the way they grow and spread. These are Bunch Type Grasses and Creeping Grasses. The creeping grasses are split into 2 further groups, namely those that spread by use of rhizomes and those that spread by means on stolons.

Bunch-type turf grasses, spread almost exclusively by tillering. Tillering is when new shoots occur  from the crown of the parent plant. This means that Read more