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Performance Bowls Green Maintenance Schedule

A few readers have asked for guidance on what work they should be carrying out on the green on a month to month basis.

Now of course conditions across the UK are widely varied at the moment; some areas in the south are free from frost, whilst here in Perthshire we can have very hard ground and many days of minus temperatures, in the southern parts of the country things can be and often are a lot milder.

When there is frost or snow cover its simply a waiting game; it really is best not to try to remove snow or ice from the green for two reasons:

  1. the damage that could be caused to the turf and soil by actually doing this work.
  2. the snow is affording the turf some protection from the worst of the cold weather; see my article on winter green protection here.

However, after the snow has gone and you start to see a prolonged period of thaw there are a few things you need to look out for as follows: Read more

Problems with Bowls Greens

Yes there are, but they are actually few in number and most of them are symptoms of the big 2.

Fusarium, Localised Dry Patch, Thatch Fungus, Compaction, Spongy Surface, Slow Green, Bumpy Surface, Anthracnose Disease, Dollar Spot, Thatch, Slime, Algae, Fairy Ring, Moss, Leatherjackets, Poor grass growth, Annual Meadow Grass, Weeds, Pearlwort, Angry members, Excessive water costs, etc etc…blah blah blah.

I could go on for a long time with that list.

This is another composite question from the search results on the site this month. About 40 people so far have typed in something like “I’ve got problems on my bowling green”

As regulars know there are only 2 problems on bowling greens; thatch and compaction and everything else is simply a symptom of these two.

So the question should maybe be:

How do bowling greens succumb to thatch and compaction?

Answer: Inappropriate Maintenance Practices.

The Circle of Decline explains this fully.

Slime on bowling green turf

Slime on bowling green turf and squidge are disorders of turf that can be both unsightly and hazardous for players as they can both make the surface slippery.

Although they don’t cause damage to the turf as such, they are signs of underlying problems with your green.

The conditions that attract these disorders to your green are excessively wet and spongy turf, usually due to excessive thatch. The soil will usually also be very acidic as a result of anaerobic soil/turf.

The medium to long term solution is to deal with the thatch and you can get the low down on that here.

Immediate and on-going aeration will help a lot to get the process of recovery started, but this has to be part of a concerted program of work to deal with compaction, thatch and generally poor soil conditions.

The question of liming acidic soil comes occasionally, but this is not recommended as broadcasting of lime on fine turf can lead to immediate outbreaks of fungal disease and in any case it usually isn’t needed.

As soon as you start to get some oxygen back into the soil by relieving compaction and dealing with the wet and usually smelly, anaerobic thatch, the soil will start to “sweeten” again.

However there is one little lime based trick you can use to clear the green of the odd patch of slime to allow a match to go ahead and its detailed here.

The main issue is to start to follow a Performance Greens maintenance program to get over the conditions that caused the problem in the first place.

ecology

Bowls Greens don’t have beds!

I often hear the phrase “putting the green to bed” at this time of year.

It is the most frustrating thing to hear because I don’t know of any club that can afford the luxury of stopping work on the green now.

The autumn and winter period is the most important time to get on top of a range of big problems that blight bowling greens.

For example Thatch encourages diseases such as fusarium, insect pests like leatherjackets and chafer grubs and contributes significantly to the onset of Localised Dry Patch the modern scourge of bowling greens throughout the UK. As if that wasn’t enough excessive thatch also saps the speed from your green and causes heavy, unpredictable rinks, contributes to un-even surfaces, causes bumpiness and bad rinks, reduces the efficacy of fertilisers and encourages weed grasses such as annual meadow grass to predominate the sward.

Then there is Compaction which impedes natural drainage, causes shallow rooting of grasses (which leads to skinning on heads), impedes irrigation and rain penetration and causes root break. And that’s before we even consider its expertise at encouraging weed grasses such as annual meadow grass, its ability to severely reduce the efficiency of irrigation, efficacy of fertilisers and its major contributory role in the creation of un-even surfaces and loss of grass cover on edges and heads.

If you only deal with these two issues this winter you will have gone a long way towards creating a performance green; they won’t go away by giving the green “a rest”.

I recently uploaded a new 18 page special report on autumn and Winter Maintenance of the Bowling Green to the Shop which shows you how to deal with thatch and compaction this Autumn and Winter as well as a host of other problems like Insect Pests, Fungal Disease, Localised Dry Patch and Moss.

Bowls Green Maintenance Public Enemy No.1

What is the single most important area of maintenance to concentrate on for a performance green?

If we want to save money on bowling green maintenance, where should we concentrate our spending?

What will give us the most bang for our buck?

3 variations of the same question that crop up on an almost daily basis here at bowls-central.

The answer is Thatch.

However, this simple one word answer is almost never received with the open arms I expect it to be.

After asking questions like the above, it seems that most enquirers are instantly deflated and disappointed with the brevity and simplicity of the answer, but this is the very essence of Performance Bowling Green Maintenance.

Click here to get started on your journey to a Performance Bowling Green.