Home » soil moisture deficit » Page 2

Tag: soil moisture deficit

for effective Bowls Green Maintenance water Deeply not Daily!

Bowling green irrigation or watering is often mis-understood and as a result is often managed insufficiently to ensure that the green performs to its highest standards.

The first thing is to make sure of, is that you are applying enough water every week and that means trying as best you can to keep a record of any rainfall and irrigation that is going onto the green.

Making irrigation management a priority in your bowling green maintenance program is crucial because in a typical dry week your green will lose the equivalent of 25mm of moisture through evaporation from the soil and transpiration from the grass plants ; please remember that this varies considerably around the country and will depend on things like temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation and of course your bowling green maintenance program.

This means that you should be aiming to get at least that amount back on.

In Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide I go into detail about Soil Moisture Deficit and how to keep a water balance sheet for the most accurate and efficient way to manage irrigation and that is a really good method to use to get this right.

However, bowling green maintenance at the height of the summer relies a lot on feel for the soil as well and although I would always try to maintain a manageable Soil Moisture Deficit to encourage deeper rooting etc, it is more important right now to get on sufficient water to ensure your green plays consistently and to keep localised dry patch under control or hopefully at bay.

This means you should be aiming to get 25mm of water on in any dry week, making allowances for any rainfall you have had by reducing that amount accordingly.

The most common pump and sprinkler set ups for bowling green maintenance from most of the major irrigation manufacturers will put out approximately 1mm of water for each 2 minutes of system run time.

This means that you need to run the system for 2 minutes per head to replace 1mm of water lost. Remember that is “per head”.

So for a 25mm watering you need to run the system for 50 minutes per head during a 7 day period.

The most effective way to do this is to get this water on in as few applications as possible. Try to aim for 25mm over 3 nights. This is much more effective and makes much better use of precious water than 7 light applications where much of the water is lost to evaporation in the morning.

In my Bowling Green Maintenance book: Performance Greens, a practical guide I go into this subject in quite a bit of detail and lay out a plan that you can use to manage irrigation more effectively.

Getting Bowls Green Irrigation Right

Bowls clubs are often divided on whether to water the green or not. When I visit clubs to advise on this, they are generally under-watering their greens.

This results in poor surfaces, especially when a green is still within the renovation phase as described in my book Performance Bowling Greens.

You can think of Soil Moisture Deficit in much the same way as a negative balance in your bank account.

Soil Water Balance Management…

…is almost unheard of within bowling circles or certainly the bowling circles I have been involved with but is a critical part of the management program to get right for high performance and deals with the management or Read more

Irrigation, how much is enough?

Irrigation, how much is enough?
irrigation management is critical but straight forward

Irrigation is on everyone’s mind at the moment, but how much is enough?

As a general rule greens lose approximately 3-4mm of moisture per dry day to evapo-transpiration, although this can vary with conditions; that’s approximately 25mm or 1 inch per week.

Again a very general rule is that many of the more popular automatic sprinkler systems will apply around 1mm of water for every 2 minutes of run time.

So again as a general rule to replace a week’s worth of losses you should be running the sprinklers for around 50 minutes in the week.

Now I will add a qualification or four to that:

  1. requirements can vary widely depending on location and conditions.
  2. don’t apply light applications on a nightly basis, try to group these into heavier and less frequent applications for best effect.
  3. try to move to a water balance sheet type system to manage irrigation more accurately…it will pay off quickly
  4. don’t rely on a typical bowling green irrigation system to apply water evenly or in sufficient volume…always check and measure what you are doing.

Irrigation management and water balance sheets in my book Performance Bowling Greens.

any questions please ask!

Localised Dry Patch still causing problems in autumn

Localised Dry Patch causing seed problems

Over-seeding of bowling greens seems like a straight-forward task; you put the seed on and the green’s bare areas recover.

However, one of our regular readers has raised an interesting question today about over-seeding and it is by no means isolated.

After over-seeding the green, the seed has taken well on the parts of the green that least needed it and nothing has happened on the barest areas of the green where the new grass is most needed!

This is unfortunately a very common problem and is usually related to our old friend Localised Dry Patch (LDP).

The barest areas of the green going into the autumn are usually the spots that have been affected by LDP and as such are bare due to lack of soil moisture.

This means that quite a lot of preparation is required before seeding and this might even include heavy watering to get the soil to hold enough moisture to get the seed off to a good start.

It might be necessary to do some light cultivation with a Sarrell roller or hand cultivator and, if the underlying soil is still dry and water repellent, a wetting agent would also help.

The main problem is that we are now a bit late for further seeding, although this largely depends on the weather and temperature. I have seeded successfully up to Christmas in the past, but success with this is obviously dependent on the remainder of the winter. Certainly if we were to get another one like last year, even early seedings will struggle to survive the winter.

If anybody is still having trouble getting grass cover on the green after overseeding please feel free to contribute ideas, tips or questions to the site.