Now have a look back over that last paragraph; if you didn’t wince at least twice, then it’s possible that you are about to embark on a program of work that will actually harm your green.

It probably won’t be dramatic like the sudden death of your green for ever, but it will probably have a negative impact on the future of your green’s ability to be presented for play consistently well, and maybe even on your club’s chance of survival in these harsh economic conditions.

The points I am referring to are the words “traditionally” and “putting the green to bed”

Traditionally, (well if you can call 30 years worth of blind repetition tradition) clubs will be ordering in up to 10 tonnes (20 tonnes in extreme cases) of “top-dressing”. This top-dressing will contain on average 75% sand; so 10 tonnes of top dressing is equal to 7.5 tonnes of sand being applied to a green that probably already has signs of damage from Localised Dry Patch, excessive thatch, low nutrient holding capability and a severe soil moisture deficit.

This is like driving the wrong way up a one way street; the maintenance program for most bowling greens in the UK needs to be the polar opposite of this.

Then we come to “putting the green to bed for winter”; this is absolute madness as the only time when we truly have the chance to overcome some of the worst excesses dressed up as Bowling Green Maintenance during the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is during the winter. The winter must be utilised to overcome excessive compaction at the very least.

There is a very simple answer to this and it is spelled out in layman’s terms in Performance Bowling Greens a practical guide. A word of warning though; it might not be what everyone wants to hear, especially those who follow the well worn path regardless of the evidence against it…

…but here is a sentence you can use to overcome the most vocal of “traditionalists”:

1 tonne of high sand content top-dressing applied to your green will cost on average £150 +VAT; multiply that by the number of tonnes you usually apply. For 5 tonnes it will be £750 and for 10 tonnes £1500, and its just wrong.

In Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide; the work program you will follow in autumn will cost a lot less and actually improve your green. Into the bargain you will be taking your green on a journey that will arrive sooner rather than later at a state you can truly describe as High Performance.

Does anyone have plans to get rid of compaction once and for all by hiring in a guy with a tractor and a big spiker that can go in 12, 16, 18, 20 inches? You add your own number here.

Pointers:

1. Compaction is an on-going issue; it’s natural and happens due to play, maintenance, weather etc.
2. There are of course factors that make compaction worse or better such as soil type and maintenance.
3. You can’t “get rid” of compaction once and for all; compaction management is an on-going bowling green maintenance task.
4. Compaction relief is best tackled mainly throughout the winter months by old fashioned (unfashionable) deep slit tining to 6-8 inches depth.
5. Green flooding is more commonly caused by thatch than compaction
6. Deeper isn’t better in this case; anything deeper than 8 inches risks damaging the subgrade of your green permanently.
7. Don’t take a tractor on your green please!

I make no apology for writing about this once again, because in my opinion this issue has the ability to accelerate the decline of many already shaky clubs.

It is also clear that there is a deep misunderstanding of the issue across the bowling community…how do I know this?

Well, on several occasions over the last week I have been confronted with some of the worst examples of Localised Dry Patch I have seen in 30 years; in some cases there is virtually no grass cover left and the green surfaces are unlikely to hold together until the end of the season, but…

Despite that, I am still coming up against two of the most mind boggling situations time after time:

1. The first is when I am actually demonstrating Localised Dry Patch in action by removing soil samples from affected greens and showing committee members powder dry soil/sand; and they insist that they think the green needs a good top-dressing!
2. The second is when I get a phone call or email from a club with the same severe LDP problems who have had a recommendation from an “expert” that they need to top-dress their green to over come the problem.

Listen folks; I know this is turning into a bit of a rant but here are a few bullet points that you must remember if your green and maybe even your club is going to survive:

1. Localised Dry Patch (LDP) is a soil disorder not a disease so it can’t be reversed over-night by any quick fix method regardless of how convincing the salesman is!
2. LDP has the capability to ruin your green beyond economical repair.
3. LDP  is so common because clubs have habitually thrown tonnes of sand based top-dressings at their greens for decades; the tipping point has been reached, many clubs are now trying to produce bowling surfaces with limited budgets on very high sand content soils; it can’t be done!
4. More sand will only make the problems worse not better.

So what can be done?

Well currently if your green is affected even mildly by LDP and you are in the process of thinking about an autumn program that includes top-dressing with several tonnes of high sand content top-dressing you are not only damaging your green, but you are also wasting hundreds of pounds.

1. My eBook Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide costs less than £20, so do your green a favour and just buy a copy…its peanuts compared to what you are about to do otherwise.
2. In the book there is a clear plan for getting over LDP and moving your green to a consistently high performance surface.
3. You will save a lot of cash by taking a more natural, less abusive approach to green maintenance.
4. The savings you make could be what saves your club from going under and your green will be on the road to recovery and consistent high performance into the bargain.

If you decide to ignore this, then please take away one message “Stop Dressing”

Readers of my book Performance Bowling Greens a practical guide will know that I am not a big fan of the industry accepted standard for bowling green watering systems. They simply don’t work well enough.

Where standard irrigation systems are struggling to apply enough water to help with fending off LDP or indeed to apply sufficient water as part of an LDP curative program then I usually recommend reverting to hand watering for at least some of the time.

So if your club is starting from scratch and doesn’t currently have an irrigation system installed I recommend that you start by funding a large holding tank; the bigger the better; a good quality pump and 50metres of ¾” professional hose.

You could add a snap fit (professional) sprinkler for ease, but it’s much better to use this arrangement to simply hand water the green. It’s a bit time consuming but it does a much more effective job than automatic systems.

Recommended tank size for automatic irrigation (on a single bowling green) allowing typically 3-4 minutes per sprinkler would be in the region of 3,500 litres

Pump duty for a single phase supply would be 130 litres per minute at 60 metres head (around 85 psi).

However, If costs are still a limitation, for hand watering, I would recommend purchasing a tank with a capacity suitable for future automatic use and a budget pump from somewhere like Machine Mart as a suitable stop gap. They have a range of small domestic pumps with a 3 pin plug which will easily cope with a ¾” hose.

If the tank size is reduced, the limiting factor on amount of application will be the available in fill of water to the storage tank.

As always if you have any questions or comments please feel free to get in touch

However, one of the most prevalent problems on bowling greens in the UK is that of Localised Dry Patch LDP a condition that causes soil to become hydrophobic (water repellent) and which is undoubtedly related to excessive sand content in rootzone

The autumn renovation program is the only real chance clubs have to start to make inroads into the major problems with their greens and the only time when it is possible to make large corrections to thatch and compaction; and you’ve guessed it, thatch is another major problem associated with LDP.

Localised Dry Patch creates large dry areas on greens where grass dies back and the surface is disrupted. All attempts to re-wet these areas by watering the green are doomed to failure due to the water repellent nature of the underlying soil.

The application of yet more sandy top-dressing is not going to make this better; indeed it will in most cases make the problem worse next year.

It would be more beneficial to start the process of recovery by following a program that includes thatch reduction, wetting agent application and overseeding. All autumn programs should include the application of a granular fertiliser to correct any underlying deficiencies, usually a low N and high K product.

Where moss is a problem; and with LDP it usually is, you should use a proprietary moss-killer or lawn sand between 2 and 4 weeks before thatch removal work.

CEC refers to a chemical process that occurs in the soil of healthy living greens and describes the process by which positively charged nutrient ions (cations) are attracted to negatively charged soil particles. This is the soil’s method of retaining the essential nutrition required by the plants and is effortlessly achieved by healthy living soil.

However, in the desert sands of most UK bowling greens, CEC is usually very low indeed and nutrition is scarce.

The thinking outlined in Performance Greens a practical guide is based around a program that can be followed to allow new organic matter to be generated by the green itself; partly through the natural breakdown of thatch by soil micro-organisms and partly (due to the scale of the problems) through inputs that we add to help the process along. And of course we must help the process along as nature isn’t usually in a hurry about these things. Incidentally we can learn a lot from this; mostly that we should be taking a very long term view of green maintenance. However, we must of course provide a decent surface during the transitional period to make sure we still have a bowling club at all.

So what can we do about increasing CEC?

Firstly it is imperative that we stop the madness of the sand, or the blind adherence to the application of high volumes of sand dominated top-dressings every year; I can’t stress this strongly enough; it MUST stop if you are to have any chance of improving your green.

Secondly we must increase soil oxygen by removing excessive thatch, relieving compaction and carrying out regular aeration.

Only then can we think about trying to help increase CEC through artificial inputs. One of the ways we can do this is to introduce CEC boosting materials such as zeolite. This is a natural mineral product that can help to retain moisture and increase CEC in the soil.

Incidentally a basic understanding of the CEC process can help us to get our heads round the general approach we should be taking to turf nutrition and dispel some more of the myths that result in the overuse of fertilisers at many clubs. In particular it is important to understand that some of the essential nutrients, Nitrogen in particular, are available to the plant as negatively charged ions (anions) and this is why we have to add Nitrogen more frequently than most other nutrients; negatively charged soil particles repel negatively charged ions. This means that nutrient anions are either taken up by plant roots or leached from the soil. This demonstrates irrefutably that it is pointless to over apply Nitrogen unless you have a penchant for contaminating your ground water with fertiliser and/or throwing money down the drain.

Rootbreak is a common feature on greens where thatch is out of control

As bowling green maintenance specialists we get lots of questions every week about thatch. So here is a quick crash course on it; what it is, what it does and how to deal with it:

What is it?

Thatch is the name given to the mat of dead roots and shoots that accumulates on the surface of the green. Where moisture, nutrition and cultural practices are optimised for the desired grasses, thatch rarely becomes a problem. However, when soil air content is low, or if drainage is poor and the fertiliser program is not optimised for the prevailing conditions, thatch can become a problem. In severe cases the major root mass might only exist within this layer and this leaves the green susceptible to drying out in summer and to the heads “skinning” (loss of turf cover) in wet weather. Thatch is also a major contributor in the encouragement of fungal pathogens like fusarium and can cause severe outbreaks of disease to occur if left unchecked. Thatch is also a major contributor to localised dry patch problems on greens

What causes thatch?

Thatch and compaction are very closely linked. When the soil becomes overly compacted due to foot and maintenance traffic, oxygen levels within the green reduce significantly. The aerobic (oxygen loving) micro-organisms (soil microbes) within the soil that break down thatch and release nitrogen that can be used by the grass plants to flourish need oxygen to thrive. The microbe population reduces drastically with reduced oxygen supplies.

What can be done?

Summer

Physical reduction of thatch is the first step. This can be started during the bowling season by pencil tining to allow more air into the soil and regular verti-cutting to keep lateral growth under control.

You also need to get on to a proper nutritional program which doesn’t use heavy applications of granular fertilisers. Spoon fed bio liquid programs are best as these provide carbohydrate which boosts grass health and increases microbial activity.

Autumn

Then in autumn you should get serious with the thatch using various methods such as hollow tining and deep, heavy duty scarification (slotting such as Graden).

Winter

In winter you need to deep slit tine your green as often as you possibly can when conditions allow (not when it is too wet or when there is frost)

Performance Bowling Greens a practical guide has a full step by step system for improving your bowling green including getting to grips with thatch.

Localised dry patch continues to be the major problem this year

Localised Dry Patch (LDP) continues to be the major difficulty in bowling green maintenance. We get a lot of our website visits from people looking for a solution to this issue. Our Localised Dry Patch Factsheet is downloaded from the site more than almost anything else.

There is also a lot of confusion out there about LDP; what it is, what causes it and how you get rid of it. There is also a lot of poor advice about dealing with LDP, some of which seems to show a complete lack of understanding of the problem and its causes.

So, although I’ve written a lot about this subject in my bowling  green maintenance advice over the years, here is a fresh recap in bullet point form that you can use to explain the problem to others and hopefully help them to understand the problem a bit better. This will also help you to gain support for your bowling green maintenance program:

Localised Dry Patch(LDP): What is it?

• LDP is a turf “disorder” not a disease.
• LDP manifests itself as large areas of browning turf which repel moisture
• Under the turf the soil will be powder dry
• The soil has become “hydrophobic”, it can’t take water on board
• Grass cover will recede quickly
• In autumn/winter these areas will be infested with moss

What causes LDP?

There are many contributing factors such as

• Excessive use of sand in bowling green maintenance practices over the years
• Excessive thatch layer
• There is some evidence that a waxy coating appearing on soil particles makes them unable to attract water. This might have some relation to the Fairy Ring Fungus
• The main causal factors are bad maintenance practices over many years mainly:
• Excessive sand top-dressings
• Poor thatch control
• Inappropriate nutritional programs
• Disjointed irrigation practices

What can be done about it?

There are two aspects to managing LDP; short term management and long term eradication.

It must be noted that because there is effectively no disease; there is also no rapid cure, the eradication process must be viewed as a course of treatment, a sea change in bowling green maintenance practices aimed at getting the green back into the condition it needs to be in to avoid problems in the future.

Short term management includes:

• Using a Sarrell roller to keep the surface open during the playing season
• Application of wetting agents regularly as advised by the manufacturer
• Hand watering of affected areas regularly, ideally with added wetting agent
• Revise your irrigation practices to ensure that enough water is applied to the affected areas

Long Term Eradication will include:

Changing your bowling green maintenance program to a natural maintenance regime which encourages a healthy, living soil and turf eco-system. To start this you should:

• Reduce the thatch layer to an optimum 5mm in depth
• Stop all sand top-dressing
• Regular compaction control aeration
• Regular aeration generally
• Use of wetting agents in the autumn program also
• Using less aggressive, natural liquid fertilisers and soil supplements
• Use a water balance sheet to manage irrigation inputs
• Communicate your plans to the club members to get maximum support for your actions.

Over the coming weeks I am sure we will be revisiting this again and again so stay tuned.

It would also be helpful to get your input on this so feel free to leave a comment here anytime

Yesterday we talked about some of the reasons commonly put forward for not watering bowling greens. I also shared with you, my amusement that so many clubs fail to mention irrigation or lack of it when looking for an explanation for the poor quality or condition of their greens; even though it’s very obvious. They will use just about every other aspect of bowling green maintenance as a reason for poor performance.

Now we come to the cost of irrigation; and I am not talking about the cost of installing a system, but merely the cost of the water being applied on any given night.

This is another big reason or excuse that I hear a lot about:

“we can’t water any more because it costs a fortune”

Now of course there will be variations (slight) around the country and also from system to system, but here is my 10 second rundown on the cost of water for irrigation:

• As we saw yesterday a typical system will put out 1mm of irrigation water for every 2 minutes of system run time.
• A typical system will also put out 150 litres per minute; so to calculate the cost per mm of irrigation we do this:
• 2 (minutes) X 150 (litres) X 4 (sprinkler heads) = 1200 litres/mm

That’s to achieve 1mm over the whole green.

As 1200 litres is 1.2 m³ you simply have to multiply the irrigation requirement in millimetres by your cost per m³ and then by 1.2

Example:

• Water balance sheet shows we need to replace 15mm of moisture loss.

• Multiply 15 (mm) X 1.2 (m³) X £/m³

• 1.2 (m3) X £0.90 = £1.08/mm of irrigation over entire green.

I’ve used 90p as an average cost, but you can find your own local charge on your water bill or by phoning the water company.

The question is whether you see irrigation as a cost or an investment in the future of your green.

When we hear discussion of soil nutrients, it is usually in terms of Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium; the famous NPK, that we see written on fertiliser bags.

However, there are another 3 major nutrients; these are Calcium, Magnesium and Sulphur.

However, the most overlooked macro or major nutrient in bowling green maintenance is Calcium. Calcium is needed by plants to grow and maintain health. It is a key constituent of cell walls.

If calcium availability is low or compromised grass plants can experience a range of difficulties

• Once fixed, calcium is not mobile in the plant. It is an important constituent of cell walls and can only be supplied in the xylem sap. Thus, if the plant runs out of a supply of calcium, it cannot remobilise calcium from older tissues.
• If transpiration is reduced for any reason, the calcium supply to growing tissues will rapidly become inadequate.

Calcium plays a very important role in plant growth and nutrition, as well as in cell wall deposition. The primary roles of calcium are:

• As a soil amendment, calcium helps to maintain chemical balance in the soil, reduces soil salinity, and improves water penetration.
• Calcium plays a critical metabolic role in carbohydrate removal in plants.
• Calcium neutralises cell acids.

Therefore the role of calcium in plants must not be overlooked.

In Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide I go into this in much more detail.