At its most basic, the answer is that excessive use of sand on bowling greens causes the under lying soil to become inert; lacking life or the complex web of interactions that go to make healthy, high performance turf. The natural balance of the soil/turf ecosystem is upset and the green will never be capable of consistent high performance for as long as the folly of top dressing is allowed to continue.
In this article we take the soil samples you removed in Fix your bowling green Step1 and look more closely at them to discover what's going on under your green. This is one of the most valuable practices that any greenkeeper can undertake as it can reveal a wealth of information about the condition of your green that you could previously only guess at.
It's hard to believe that a bowling club could easily save £1800 in greenkeeping costs every year whilst actually improving the green. Do nothing greenkeeping is my name for this phenomenon and I estimate that 98% of UK bowling clubs could benefit from it, starting this year.
Over 37 years of greenkeeping and teaching greenkeepers I have come to notice that bowling green performance comes down to just 3 major characteristics. Sounds easy then, doesn't it? Well it actually gets even easier when you identify the one key problem that contributes more to poor bowling green performance than any other.
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:
