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.
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.
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.
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:
Greenkeeping Tasks for September and October have become to some degree a bit repetitive. This would be fine if the desired results followed, but in the majority of cases this can't be said to be true. This month John explains the science behind the perfect autumn renovation plan to get your green started down the road to consistent high performance.
A very general title for today’s article, but it reflects the current industry desire for a fix all solution to achieving a good bowling green.
Most clubs are unhappy to some extent with the performance of their bowling greens.
This leads to an open ended search for solutions where the searcher i.e. the bowling club or bowling club management official simply looks for information from whatever source to help with the perennial problem of the bowling green.
If this is you, if you simply don’t know where to start in your quest for the truth about achieving a consistently good bowling green here is my suggested reading in order of importance. You can click on these links for more in depth information:
Have you ever played a great game of bowls when everything on the green was perfect; you read every twitch on the rink and it seemed like you had finally got the green the way you wanted it.
The disappointment when you return to the green the very next day, prepare the rink in completely the same way but get totally different and inferior results is maddening.
What went wrong? or maybe what went right?
Like green speed, there is much debate about surface consistency, both in terms of consistency across the green surface and consistency of playing conditions over the season.
In order of their impact on green surface consistency these are the top 7 factors that you should bear in mind. Obviously there are others such as weather patterns, level of play etc, but these are largely out of the greenkeepers control and in any case do not figure highly in the management of green consistency.
Where grass grows on soil of any type the health of the turf/soil eco-system can be assessed by looking at the thatch layer.
On grass areas where there is little or no human interference in the form of excessive compaction, fertiliser, pesticides and mechanical work (other than mowing) such as in meadows or parks the thatch layer will almost always be at the optimum level for a continued healthy turf/soil eco-system. This is due to the soil/plant relationship being in balance; a strong and sufficiently lively soil microbe population releases nutrition from the thatch layer as it decomposes naturally.
As we move to areas that are subjected to progressively higher maintenance and wear activity, the thatch layer is susceptible to becoming thicker and denser and therefore needs more intensive management if the turf/soil relationship is to be kept in balance.
This can be observed by taking samples from a variety of grassed areas and comparing them to your bowling green’s thatch layer; rough meadows and areas such as the roughs on golf courses being the most natural and healthy areas and greens usually being the least healthy and in need of the most remedial work to keep them right.
When turf is used for bowling or other activities, the soil becomes compacted which is literally the expulsion of air from the soil. This throws the natural balance in the turf/soil relationship and makes it necessary for us to intervene to correct things.It is important to remember that thatch is always being produced and the more vigorous and intensively used and managed the turf is the faster it produces thatch. The desireable fine bent grasses and the common weed-grass, annual meadowgrass are prolific thatch producers.
If we don’t do the right things to correct this effect or indeed if we don’t do them often enough the green can very quickly fall into the circle of decline we looked at in an earlier article.
After LDP there is probably more information on this site about Thatch than anything else.
Thatch production by grass plants is a natural process.
Thatch is the layer at the very top of the green surface between the green grass blades and the brown soil beneath.
Simply put; the bigger the distance between the green and the brown, the bigger a problem you have.
The denser and wetter and smellier the thatch layer between the green and the brown the more likely it is that you will be suffering other problems like fungal disease, slime, algae, moss, weeds, localised dry patch, bumpy surface, lack of green speed, lack of green consistency, grass growth problems, recovery problems, skinned heads, slippery surface and loss of grass cover.
Thatch is not an isolated problem; it usually comes along with some or all of the above.
To get a more thorough understanding of the processes going on here, have a look at this article.
For more detailed information on thatch, there are more articles here.
Performance Bowling Greens eBook is here.
