- Top dressing is counter productive to producing a Performance Bowling Green
- Following the Performance Bowls Green system reduces maintenance costs from day 1.
- Doing too much work on your green can be detrimental to its condition.
- The performance greens program has the long term effect of reducing the work needed on the green.
- Performance bowls greens can be maintained with zero pesticides, another saving.
Tag: performance greens
Preventative fungicide
The agronomic advice received by many clubs with regard to winter maintenance is just wrong and no where is this more prevalent than in the advice given about fungal disease prevention.
A healthy, living soil contains many different types of fungi and only a few of them are potentially harmful to the green.
If the green and soil are maintained in a healthy condition, even the potentially harmful fungal pathogens like fusarium, take all patch, dollar spot, anthracnose etc, although probably still present, pose no real threat to the turf.
The soil under your green when in its natural state is a little eco-system all of its own and the balance of this eco-system is easily destroyed by clumsy maintenance practices.
Soil micro-organisms and all manner of beneficial fungi need to thrive under there to make your green work the way it should i.e. to a high standard with the minimum of chemical intervention. Beneficial soil fungi actually work with grass plants to help them take up essential nutrition from the soil.
For this reason, even a green that is knackered and at the very beginning of the Performance Greens turnaround process should not be subjected to blanket applications of any fungicide.
This is because broad spectrum fungicides are pretty blunt instruments and don’t differentiate between good and bad fungi, meaning that every blanket application is essentially turning your green away from the door at the Performance Greens Annual Dance!
The whole process of decline in greens due to “traditional” maintenance is detailed here.
The recovery process is outlined here.
One reader told me of his recent bill for fungicide totalling over £800; for a tiny fracftion of that money you can get yourself a map out of this madness here.
Performance bowls green properties.
How can we ensure a consistently high performance bowling green that is economical to produce and maintain. There are 4 specific goals that we need to achieve to say that we have such a green:
Green Speed; the actual surface pace that we can reasonably expect from the green on a regular basis.
Consistency; the ability of the green to replicate high performance throughout the day, week and season and also from season to season.
Predictability; the ability of the green and individual rinks to be set up for play of a reasonably predictable nature, time after time and over time.
Achievability; high performance must be not only physically achievable but also relatively easily achievable and for that the program we put in place must tick the following boxes; it must be:
Workable; with “in-house” labour and skills or with a financially sustainable amount of “bought in” labour and skills.
Sustainable in terms of its environmental, financial and infrastructural requirements.
Replicable time after time within the parameters defined above.
Minimum Input in terms of artificial fertilisers, chemicals and expensive bought in machinery or skills.
The goals we have set above require us to produce a very specific kind of green surface.
Performance Bowls Greens-Getting Down to it
The season is well underway now and its around this time in the season when suddenly it hits clubs that the green isn’t up to scratch…again!
One of the most common problems we hear about from Performance Bowls Greens readers is the difficulty in getting the philosophy to stick at their club. Its all too simple to fall off the wagon and go back to old “traditional” habits.
There are of course no silver bullets in Bowling Green Management but for a lot of clubs the call of the “instant fix” magic potion from a bag or bottle soon looks much more attractive than the relentless application of a strict maintenance program that takes time to show results.
The difference however, is that by applying the Performance Bowling Greens philosophy you ensure that your green improves a little bit every week, and that you work inexorably towards excellence in green surface management.
The typical reliance on the quick fix that still dominates the bowling green maintenance world delivers the most disappointing of results, when greens suffer the continuous peaks and troughs of acceptable performance followed by seemingly un-fixable surface disasters. This the sequence of trial and error that sees clubs go through many phases of committee and greenkeeper changes while meantime the green just keeps getting worse.
To deliver a Performance Bowling Green you must stick to a plan that makes allowance for the following phases of development.
- Green Appraisal- Thorough Agronomic and Performance appraisal of green.
- Baseline Maintenance Plan– to provide a firm foundation before further development.
- Remedial Maintenance Program– work to correct underlying problems.
- High Performance Plan– Measures employed to develop green towards performance requirements of club.
- Continuous Improvement– A program of Continuous Improvement ensures continued high performance
Such an approach is easily understood by all concerned and simple to communicate to the wider membership.
More soon.
The Pursuit of Excellence and…economy.
Now that the new season is upon us, we’ve been getting a lot of enquiries asking two basic questions:
What is the ideal maintenance program to ensure an excellent bowling green surface this year? and…
How can we reduce costs for maintenance without compromising the performance of the green?
Well, although both of these questions are fairly easy to answer, the actual solution depends a lot on what has gone before and at what stage your green is at, in terms of performance at the moment.
The pursuit of excellence on a sensible budget is very much the theme of Performance Bowling Greens.
In the book you will find a step by step blueprint in layman’s terms where John explains the reasons why most bowling greens don’t perform to the required standard, or if they do, why they don’t seem capable of perfoming consistently over the long term.
Also in the book John talks about his philosophy on high performance bowling greens, what makes them and how to achieve a tournament quality green on a reasonable budget, consistently.
John said ” I decided to write this book to detail in layman’s terms the exact formula needed for a great bowling green. A formula that is based on thorough scientific research and experience”
He went on to say: “I also wanted to alert bowling club officials and greenkeepers to the 4 major obstacles that stand in their way, the 4 obstacles that repeatedly stop them from producing the green they desire, so that hopefully they can learn to spot these and avoid them in the future.”
You can get hold of your copy of Performance Bowling Greens here.