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Why do greenkeepers spike a bowls green?

We spike to alleviate compaction and introduce more air into the soil.

Ok, our first web search term question. I’ll try to follow this format for all questions, i.e. the question will be the title of the post, there will be a concise, one sentence answer in block quotes for those in a hurry and then we’ll look a bit more in-depth for those who want more detail.

Comments of course will be welcome as always, so feel free to ask questions, or throw in your contribution.

OK, so the first one is a common one:

First of all let’s explain what the term “spike” means.

Spiking is a generic term used to describe Read more

Traditional Bowls Green Aeration

Rob emailed with an interesting question about using the old fashioned forking method of aeration during periods when the green is excessively wet, like now probably in many parts. Here is Rob’s full question and my reply to him earlier. If anybody has views on this subject please feel free to share:

Do you know anything about the traditional ‘raise forking’ or ‘graip’ aeration methods that were used? What kind of forks were used? (straight? curved? how thick were the prongs?) and how deep did the go down ? etc.

I am interested in such traditional techniques and yet cannot find out any information about it?

After the snow the greens are absolutely soaked through and I wondered if trying this traditional technique might dry them out with minimum disturbance?

Well, although I have used the method (under duress) in the past, I didn’t have all of the answers I would have liked for Rob:

Hi Rob and Happy New Year

I am not aware of any special equipment for this, but I have done it.

Usually this was with a normal garden fork; the technique was to work backwards and push the fork in as far as possible at intervals equivalent to the space between the tines on the fork so as to create a square hole pattern.

After pushing the fork in to full depth (6 to 8 inches) you wiggled it about and heaved it backwards slightly before removing and moving on to the next.

Back-breaking and very labour intensive mind you.

Before going to extreme measures it might be worth checking that the ground isn’t still frozen at some point below as this might be causing the slow down in drainage.

During the winter I recommend using a deep slit tiner as often as possible, which automates this procedure to some extent and has a very good effect on compaction related problems like this.

You can find articles on this here:

Last week I shared some links to resources including the most suitable machinery for this work; you can see that article here:

If any reader has some light to shed on this subject then I would be very interested to hear it.

John

Bowls Digest

With all of this snow I’ve been looking for excuses to sit close to the fire, but I was feeling guilty about not producing any benefit for my readers, so here is a short selection of resources and information I’ve found useful and interesting lately

Bowls World Blog

Although not brimming with content and not updated very regularly this blog has a couple of in depth articles that might be of interest; including a look at the bowls manufacturing process and some guidance on learning to bowl and improving your game. http://bowlsworldblog.blogspot.com/

Bowls World

The main site relating to the above blog has a wealth of products of interest to the bowler. http://www.bowlsworld.co.uk/

World Bowler

Good site with a quite a lively forum with bowlers contributing form all corners of the globe. http://www.worldbowler.com/

Julian Haines

A popular site with a very active forum with lots of interesting debate and opinion on all things bowls; check out the greenkeepers corner section. http://www.julianhainesbowls.co.uk/forum/

Bowls Club Info

This site claims to be the biggest list of lawn bowls links on the internet.
You’ll find links to bowls web sites from around the globe – from the smallest English country green to the largest aussie mega-club!
The site owner’s aims are to help promote all bowls club web sites by offering free inclusion in the links lists and to provide low-cost but professional looking web page hosting for bowls clubs. http://www.bowlsclub.info/

Irrigation Running Costs and Bowls Club Success

A funny time of year to be talking about irrigation but it is a surprisingly popular search term for the site.

So what are the costs of running irrigation on your green?

Well as you would imagine this can easily turn into a “how long is a piece of string?” type of debate. That’s due of course to the plethora of different irrigation systems around the country and of course the weather.

However, what we can do is look at some basic irrigation facts and then, armed with some key information from your irrigation hardware and utility bills; we can make a good estimate of the costs of running the system.

First let’s look at fixed costs:

These are primarily the cost of maintaining the system after its in place. On newer systems this will probably take the form of the cost of a maintenance contract with a qualified irrigation engineer; as the system gets older this will also have to have an element of contingency planning for new parts etc.

Then we look at the variable costs such as electricity and water:

Where most of your irrigation is carried out on automatic (recommended) the variable cost of labour is negligible. So we need to know how much a unit of electricity costs us and we can get that information from the bill, same with the water costs.

Armed with the cost of water per m3 and the cost of electricity per kw/h we can then work out the actual true cost of running irrigation on our greens.

Pump Outputs are typically expressed in litres per minute.

However, for the majority of systems that are configured as Read more

Statistical Analysis; to give you the Bowls Green Maintenance answers you need

Don’t worry, we’re not going all mathematical on you.

Over the past 2 years the traffic to this site has steadily grown and now provides help and advice to a big proportion of the UK Bowling Club Scene.

I know this, because like every website; in the background we have what are known as Web Stats or statistics.

The web stats provide a lot of good information and allow us to mould the content of the site to provide the kind of advice we think you want.

One of the really great parts of these web stats is the section that allows us to see what terms people type into search engines before being directed to the site.

For this month alone, the list extends to over 4 full A4 pages of search topics, many of them in the form of questions like for example “will too much water harm our green?” or “what are the favourable conditions for fusarium?”

So what I thought I’d do is start to answer some of these questions at the rate of perhaps 1 a day and see how we get on with that.

Keep your eyes peeled for our new “web search” Tag

Speak to you soon John