There has been a lot of interest in the book this week as John has been sharing some of his insights about bowling green maintenance with us. We would like to thank all of you who have filled out the pre-booking form and apologise for not getting back to all of you personally, but this would have taken too much time out of an already busy week. We have now compiled a list of pre-bookings and will be in touch as soon as the book is available on Monday.

Meantime if you would like to be added to the pre-booking list please fill out the form below and you will get priority notice of the book’s availability. We are doing this to try to make sure the site isn’t overloaded with requests on Monday.

So have a great weekend and we will be back in touch soon.

Now I should warn you at the outset that this is a long one and you might want to grab a coffee before we get started. The reason for the length of this article is that I don’t just want to discuss the process of top-dressing; I also want to show you how damaging it can be to your green and how damaging it can be to your wallet. To do that I am going to re-present to you 3 of the most clicked on articles we’ve ever published on this site (which shows, I think, that many clubs already understand the problem). So here we go:

At most bowling clubs the end of September is when thoughts will start to turn to the autumn renovation program or the “closing of the green” as many clubs call it. Bowling clubs throughout the UK will take delivery of between 3 and 10 tonnes of very expensive top-dressing compost, which will be applied to the green after hollow tining or some other aeration operation, in the belief that this will ensure that the green is in perfect condition next season. However, too much top-dressing can actually  harm the green and in many cases, clubs simply shouldn’t be doing it at all…but why?

Localised Dry Patch

Over the last 20 years Localised Dry Patch (LDP) has become a major problem on bowling greens, and although this is not wholly attributable to top-dressing, the excessive use of sand in the top-dressing mix has caused water retention problems on a lot of greens.

It is of course desirable to have a free draining soil profile on a bowling green to help to encourage deep rooting of the grasses and to maintain a reasonable green speed for play. However, continued application of bulk sandy dressings is of limited benefit to most greens and actually harmful to many due to their already high sand content and related lack of soil microbial activity.

Thatch

Natural plant decomposition results in a build up of organic material (thatch) at the soil surface, which will become much more water retentive than desired. However, the answer to this does not lie with dilution of the organic layer with huge amounts of sand, but rather in reducing this layer through judicious and very regular aeration and core removal.

Soil Exchange

Where the soil is less than perfect for fine turf production, soil exchange programs consisting of hollow tining followed by top-dressing with a more desirable growing medium will still be required, but this is an entirely different subject.

Green Levels versus Surface Smoothness

There is a great difference between “Surface Smoothing” and “Surface Levelling”. Surface smoothness in this context relates to very minor discrepancies in the surface which can be rectified by a combination of surface aeration, rolling and light top-dressing.

Surface levels on the other hand cannot generally be greatly improved through even “Heavy” top dressing work. This term relates to much more severe changes in level which can be measured by laser survey and can be seen to have a visible affect on a wood’s traverse across the green.

“Heavy Topdressing” usually defined as dressings over 6 tonnes will not have a dramatic effect on surface levels and are more in keeping with the type of operation required by new greens for the first 2 to 3 seasons to achieve the final levels not ironed out during construction.

I say this because if you do the calculations, a 10 tonne dressing over an average green (1400 m2) will result in a maximum coverage of 4mm, which is only suitable for smoothing out the smallest of imperfections.

Irrigation

Going back to the main issue of greens drying out, the average bowling club in the UK is finding it difficult to find the money to irrigate the green sufficiently during dry weather. Again when we look at the numbers, the average automatic irrigation system throws out approximately 1mm of water for every 2 minutes of run time.

Now I visit a lot of bowling clubs and I know that many of them rely on “rule of thumb” measurements like 4 minutes per head etc when timing irrigation. Well, on average a green will lose 25mm of moisture to evapo-transpiration (a measure of the combined effects of soil evaporation and plant transpiration) and that’s from a healthy green in a normal dry week. This doesn’t take account of excessively high sand content, drying winds or existing dry patch problems etc.

To simply replace the moisture lost from one day’s evapo-transpiration you need to run your irrigation system for 8 minutes per head, that’s double and in some cases several times what many clubs are doing. Over a 7 day period this equates to 50 minutes of run time per head.

Catch 22

Turning back to Localised Dry Patch. This is a condition that causes large sections of the green surface to turn brown due to lack of moisture. No amount of irrigation will make these areas re-wet. They are literally “hydrophobic” or water repellent. Careful use of wetting agents and hand watering can make some improvement, but usually it takes a wet winter to bring about full re-wetting. The main trouble with LDP is its tendency to make the green bumpy. This happens when the baked dry thatch layer on top of the soil starts to shrink below the surface of the surrounding healthy turf. Irrigation makes the problem worse as the healthy areas grow more and the dry areas recede further.

To crown it all, continued heavy use of the irrigation system in the desperate effort to bring these areas back to life, starts to encourage thatch fungus, which eventually sinks and causes an even more uneven surface.

A Closer Look at Localised Dry Patch

Localised Dry Patch (LDP) is a condition that causes turf to become hydrophobic (water repellent).

Once LDP has taken hold, irrigation simply causes the unaffected areas to get lusher while the LDP affected areas get drier. This exacerbates the problem making the green increasingly frustrating to play on.

Soil sampling will reveal powder dry soil. Unsightly brown patches of turf start to spread over most of the green. The turf on these areas recedes causing a bumpy surface and in most cases the weakened grass will be taken over by moss. But what can be done to cure the problem?

Research shows that fungi can contribute to the onset of this problem. Fungal mycelium may coat individual soil particles making it impossible for water to adhere to them.

However, in our experience thatch control and irrigation management are the two most critical factors in the management of this problem.

By the time the problem is visually evident it is already too late to achieve an effective cure. This is because the problem is inherent in the green and usually only becomes visible at the height of the season.

Irrigation management requires an understanding of Water Balance in the soil and this is detailed in our Irrigation Management

Factsheet. Just look at the infra-red thermographic image on the right, it shows an infrared image of a bowling green. The red areas show the extra heat that is being kicked out by the LDP affected areas, and that is directly related to the lack of moisture retained in the soil in these areas. In the standard photo further down the page, the LDP is barely noticeable at this stage, but will get steadily worse.

Frequently we are now seeing that areas affected by dry patch disorders have suffered a complete depletion of moisture and that the soil structure has failed, turning to powder. Traditional wetting agents have sought to address dry patch from a very limited viewpoint, namely the reduction of water surface tension making it easier for water to be attracted and held around individual soil particles.

Although Wetting Agents can be used to good effect on LDP once dry patch has progressed to what we call breaking point, no amount of simple surfactant wetting agent will help it re-wet sufficiently to ensure a full recovery of the turf with full grass cover. Typically the manager has to wait for the turf to over-winter before full grass cover is returned.

This makes it all the more critical that we ensure that the products we use are effective in both results and cost.

As LDP is a disorder within the soil it is important to keep one eye on re-wetting and one on re-building the soil’s health. This can best be achieved by ensuring that you use a  wetting agent product which can supply carbohydrates to the soil in addition to their soil re-wetting properties. The addition of a high volume of Carbohydrates ensures that the products also contribute to the maintenance of soil structure while helping stressed grass plants hang on to life for longer while the soil is re-wetting.

Excessive use of sand on bowling greens over the years has been the single biggest influence on the occurrence of LDP and we cover this in other posts under the top-dressing and LDP categories which you can browse at your leisure. You can find more information on LDP management in our LDP factsheet here.

This Tradition is Seriously Bad for your Wealth

Now that we have seen how relatively recent this “tradition” of top-dressing is and how potentially damaging the procedure is I would like to finish by looking briefly at the effect it has on the club’s finances.

I have lost count of the words I have written, conversations I have had and arguments I have inadvertently started about one of  greenkeepings’ greatest follies;  routinely top-dressing your green with high sand content top dressing composts year in and year out. During my greenkeeping career over 3 decades and during countless hours of research I have been amazed to find clubs where 5, 7 or even 10 tonnes of top-dressing is being applied every autumn.

The really tragic thing about this practice is that in every case the club are paying for a contractor to hollow tine (core) the green and then apply this material.

Let me ask you where the cores from your green go after they are lifted?

I would hazard a guess that you either spread them on the rose beds around the green or give them away to members for their gardens.

Now hollow tining is typically carried out to a depth of 100mm (4 inches) and usually only 10-15 percent of the core is unwanted thatch.

So that means that 85-90% of each core is made up of all of the expensive top-dressing you have been applying over the years. No wonder the roses look so good!

With top-dressing now costing around £130 per tonne, its easy to see how hundreds of pounds are wasted like this on nearly every bowling green in the UK every year.

In addition to this there are a lot of negative agronomic impacts associated with this practice as we have seen:

Localised Dry Patch is exacerbated by excessive sand content. This causes areas of the green surface to become impervious to water and dry out completely. The end result is an un-healthy, bumpy green which becomes susceptible to disease, moss infestation and loss of grass cover.

This is just one instance of good money being thrown after bad at just about every bowling green across the land.

Now this is not to say that top-dressing is never required or isn’t a valuable tool in the greenkeepers arsenal. There are times when top-dressing is absolutely the right thing to do.

However, there is generally no need to blindly apply several tonnes every autumn, only to keep the roses looking good!

In my new book Performance Bowling Greens, which will be released on this site on Monday 15^th February, I will be detailing a more measured and calm approach to bowling green maintenance based on scientific fact, a deep understanding of nature and the interaction between turfgrass and soil. An approach, in fact a full program you can follow to ensure that your green performs to a very high standard at a reasonable cost.

Tomorrow we are going to look at the folly of what is considered “conventional” Bowling Green Maintenance and how this sends a high proportion of the UK’s greens into a tailspin towards disaster.

Until then you can pre-book your copy of Performance Bowling Greens by completing the form below:

Earlier this week I was talking about the 4 barriers to success that I regularly encounter at bowling clubs. These were Desperation (for a good green), Traditions (that aren’t as traditional as we think sometimes), Myths (not dragons and wizards, but greenkeeping myths) and of course Consistency or rather the lack of it.

Well today I want to tell you a story about a typical bowling club. Just for the record this isn’t based on any one club, but is a very common pattern of events. If you are a bowling club member, you might instantly recognise this pattern and think I am talking about your club, but I assure you I’m not. If you are a bowling club member and this doesn’t ring any bells, then I would put money on your green being the best in your area, that you have a thriving membership and everything at your club is rosy. If that’s the case you are to be congratulated. To the story then:

Back in the late 1970’s our bowling club was doing ok, membership was thriving and the green was playing well. The greenkeeper, who we’ll call Tom, was an enthusiastic amateur and up until that point he had the full backing of the membership, he was doing a good job. Tom happily accepted advice and bought some of his materials from, a local man who worked for a turf supplies company and had a good grounding in turf maintenance. Let’s call him Harry.

Tom followed a fairly traditional maintenance program, which included 3-4 applications of granular fertiliser per year, regular scarifying and aeration and the occasional use of fungicide if there was some disease in autumn and winter. When the green closed at the end of September each year Tom would spend a bit of extra time reducing the thatch that had built up during the year and taking care of moss and doing running repairs etc. Harry usually came along to offer advice and support.

Now due to the fairly basic set up he had, Tom usually had the green in OK playing condition, but the use of straight, granular fertiliser usually meant that the green would be very slow for the 2 weeks after application and it would slowly improve in speed as the fertiliser lost its first flush of nutrient release. The main thing is that the members were happy with the green for the most part and understood that it was overall in pretty good shape.

Everything was fine and the  green was improving slowly year on year until one of the club’s “elite” player members, who we’ll call…Dick, who had a bit of a gob on him (to use the modern parlance), decided that the green was inconsistent, not predictable enough and a bit too slow for his high level of bowling skill and due to his aforementioned facial attribute was able to drum up the support of a few members in his quest to get the club to take a different approach to maintaining the green.

To cut a long story short Tom was fired and replaced by Bob, the new greenkeeper who was a young, fully qualified guy from the local golf course and a good friend of Dick’s. Bob had been to college and was keen to make his mark on the green.

It was coming up to the end of the season and Bob had a lot of great ideas for the green. First thing he did was drop the cutting height from Tom’s cautious 4.5mm to 3mm; he even had to get a new bottom blade fitted to the mower to achieve this.

Come the end of the season, Bob had 10 tonnes of sand delivered and hired in a contractor to deep spike the green to 12 inches depth; he then spread the sand onto the green to fill the great holes created by the machine.

Bob continued in this vane, copying the maintenance his boss at the golf course was doing on their USGA golf greens and for the next 2 years everything went smoothly for him.

The following year there was really wet summer and the green flooded badly and despite all of the sand and the deep holes the green seemed completely unable to deal with the extra rain they had that year.

Well Bob suffered the same fate as Tom after the club had consulted with Harry, who told them that they should never have allowed Bob to use the deep spiker on the green as it had irreparably damaged the subgrade or base of the green and disrupted the green’s ability to drain properly.

Dick of course, spoke up and convinced the committee or at least enough of them that Harry was out of touch and that he had heard of a new contracting company who could turn the green around with some new products and techniques they were promoting.

So…the new contractor started and followed a program very similar to Tom and Harry’s, but they were never told about the trouble that Bob had caused with the drainage, largely because the club had now collectively “forgotten” that episode and didn’t really believe Harry anyway.

Two years on the new contractor was kicked out even though most members agreed that the green was more consistent due to their better quality machines and less aggressive fertilisers which didn’t produce flushes of growth and the problems that go with them, namely peaks and troughs of fast and slow green surfaces. It was now 1989.

Since then the pattern above has been repeated another 3 times and the green is now in a pretty sorry state, although there have been flickers of brilliance from it when the weather conditions landed just right on 2 or 3 occasions over the last 20 years. In 2008 and 2009, it was closed a lot of the time due to flooding, but they were exceptionally wet summers. However, the damage caused by Bob to the subgrade is never going to go away and will come back to haunt the club time after time in the future.

What’s the moral of the story?

Well I could get a cheap laugh by doing a joke about not letting any old Tom, Dick or Harry look after your green… but I won’t!

The story illustrates without exaggeration the situations I have been involved in at more clubs than I care to remember over the last 30 years. In some of those situations I was Tom, in others I was Harry and in many others I was the hapless contractor who didn’t stand a chance. I was nearly Bob on a couple of occasions, but thankfully I was never the other guy, although a couple of times when my back’s been turned on a bowling green I’m sure the committee members must have got confused and thought I was… sounded like his name anyway!

As I said yesterday, if you have been a member at a bowling club for more than a few years, you will recognise this story. If you don’t, then its likely that your green is already very good or getting near to it and that you have been following a sound greenkeeping program consistently for many years.

In this story we have seen the 4 greatest obstacles to achieving a High Performance Bowling Green; Inconsistency (how many times did this club change its course?), Greenkeeping Myths (the dreaded deep spiker that will cure all), Traditions (the “tradition” of applying sand or sandy topdressings year after year for no sound reason) and of course Desperation Mode, which is the state a club gets into when it realises it has made a mistake but doesn’t have forever to wait for results. Unfortunately that is exactly what a club in Desperation Mode has to do…wait forever for results.

In my new book Performance Bowling Greens, which will be released on this site on Monday 15^th February, I will be detailing a more measured and calm approach to bowling green maintenance based on scientific fact, a deep understanding of nature and the interaction between turfgrass and soil. An approach, in fact a full program you can follow to ensure that your green performs to a very high standard at a reasonable cost.

Tomorrow I will share with you the unfortunate truth about one of the most costly yet least traditional “traditions” that prevails at nearly every bowling club in the UK.

Until then you can pre-book your copy of Performance Bowling Greens by completing the form below:

Well if we consider the sport of bowls as a business for a minute it is clear, at least in the UK , that there is a vast over supply in the bowling marketplace. There simply isn’t enough demand for bowling to sustain the sheer volume of clubs that currently exist. The reasons for this are manifold and include some really “deep” factors which economists and sociologists might describe as, well… socio-economic, but the most important thing for bowling clubs to consider is that there simply aren’t enough bowlers around to make every UK bowling club economically sustainable. In other words some, maybe many, clubs will perish  in the years to come.

Of course, there are big picture issues that can be addressed and might help to improve the uptake of the game, like for instance the way bowls is marketed, and the general image of the game, perhaps more TV coverage of tournaments would help. All of that is big stuff, that can and will take a long time to bear fruit.

Meantime, if we come back to the close up view, the view out of your clubhouse window in fact, we can all start to do something this year to give our own club the greatest chance of survival; and that is to commit to providing our members, visitors and prospective members with the best green possible to play on. This one thing is, in my opinion,  the key to growing the game again from the ground up in the years to come.

The 2 greatest barriers to the average bowling club making such a commitment are :

1. the perceived cost and…
2. the perceived difficulty associated with such a plan.

The key word here is “perceived” and there is good reason for that as we saw yesterday when we looked at inconsistency, traditions, desperation mode and greenkeeping myths all of which add to the perception of great expense.

If you’ve been reading my posts this week you will know that my new book Performance Bowling Greens is due to be released on this site on Monday 15th February and my major impetus for sitting down to write the book in the first place was to banish the notion that Performance Bowling Greens are inhibitively expensive and/or difficult to produce consistently.

In Performance Bowling Greens I detail a no-nonsense blueprint that you can follow to get the ultimate Performance from your Bowling Green. This really is a break with tradition (and if you read my post yesterday you will know the truth behind tradition) and a re-evaluation of how Performance Bowling Greens actually work. The book dispels all of the commonly accepted Greenkeeping Myths and moves straight to the program you must follow to achieve the highest level of performance and consistency from your green. Above all I have written the book in a way that will give you the confidence to just get on and do it.

Yesterday I shared with you my thoughts on the main reasons that clubs fall into the cycle of inconsistency and therefore perpetual disappointment with their greens. Today I would like to re-stress just how important it is that your club starts to follow a structured improvement plan aimed at producing a high performance green consistently over the long term.

When you pick up your copy of Performance Bowling Greens next Monday you will have a step by step blueprint that you can follow to turn your green around for good and start to enjoy the extra security such a green will provide for your club. The most important aspect of the book is that it details an approach that any club can take and in almost every case, it won’t only improve the green’s performance dramatically but will also return a significant financial saving to the club.

Tomorrow I will share a typical bowling club story with you and if you don’t recognise your own club within the story its possible that you already have a high performance bowling green.

Remember you can pre-book your copy of Performance Bowling Greens by completing the form below: Meantime I’ll will be back tomorrow with my bowling club story.

1. Desperation Mode; or a state of mind that permeates a club when nothing they do seems to yield the results they crave.
2. Lack of Consistency; which is direct result of the 1st obstacle, and is when the club repeatedly changes its approach to maintenance because it basically has no faith in any of the maintenance models it encounters.
3. Tradition; although a lot of the traditions in question are not that old.
4. Greenkeeping Myths.

The reasons for the problems I have just mentioned are mainly to do with the need that exists in every industry to have companies or people who can supply materials and equipment in order for the work of that industry (in our case greenkeeping) to go ahead. So you see as greenkeepers or bowling clubs we are part of a commercial chain that needs constant lubrication in order to keep going.  The end result of that process is the pressure put on all of us to try new things, new machines, new fertilisers, new chemicals etc. And of course this isn’t a bad thing in itself, because if it wasn’t for this continual process we wouldn’t have any of the tools we need to continue maintaining our green. The trouble comes when laymen or greenkeepers lacking confidence in their abilities are constantly bombarded with new “stuff” by “experts”. This leads to “new traditions” which lead to a lack of consistency, which leads to poor results, which leads to desperation for a solution and desperate people are willing to believe anything, so even myths can take on the appearance of common sense.

In Performance Bowling Greens I will be detailing a more measured and calm approach to bowling green maintenance based on scientific fact, a deep understanding of nature and the interaction between turfgrass and soil. An approach, in fact a full program you can follow to ensure that your green performs to a very high standard at a reasonable cost.

And its there that we will pick up the story tomorrow, as I will be looking at how heavily the future of bowling depends on the ability of clubs like yours to deliver consistent high performance on what can only be described as a shoestring budget.

You can pre-book your copy of Performance Bowling Greens by completing the form below: Meantime I’ll will be back tomorrow with more news.

What is the ideal maintenance program to ensure an excellent bowling green surface this year? and…

How can we reduce costs for maintenance without compromising the performance of the green?

Well, although both of these questions are fairly easy to answer, the actual solution depends a lot on what has gone before and at what stage your green is at, in terms of performance at the moment.

The pursuit of excellence on a sensible budget has been very firmly on John Quinn, our Managing Director’s mind over the last few months also. That’s because he’s been absorbed in finishing his new book, Performance Bowling Greens, due for release on 15th February.

In the book that he describes as “A step by step blueprint in layman’s terms” John explains the reasons why most bowling greens don’t perform to the required standard, or if they do, why they don’t seem capable of perfoming consistently over the long term.

Also in the book John talks about his philosophy on high performance bowling greens, what makes them and how to achieve a tournament quality green on a reasonable budget, consistently.

John said ” I decided to write this book to detail in layman’s terms the exact formula needed for a great bowling green. A formula that is based on thorough scientific research and experience”

He went on to say: “I also wanted to alert bowling club officials and greenkeepers to the 4 major obstacles that stand in their way, the 4 obstacles that repeatedly stop them from producing the green they desire, so that hopefully they can learn to spot these and avoid them in the future.”

Tomorrow John will reveal the 4 major obstacles he sees getting in the way of excellence almost everywhere he looks in the bowling world.

You can pre-book your copy of Performance Bowling Greens by completing the form below: Meantime John will be back tomorrow with more news.

Feeding Time

2 things in bowling green maintenance annoy me more than anything else. One is the feeding frenzy stirred up and enjoyed by many bowling green maintenance contractors in the autumn, usually driven by an unsolicited sales letter offering “Autumn Programs” sent by someone who has never seen your green!

Many clubs across the country will succumb to this sales gimmick year after year  without ever realising that it isn’t necessarily the best thing to do. You see Autumn has traditionally been feeding time for contractors. Its at the end of the season that they get the opportunity to raise a big invoice to clubs for the “back end” renovation works. An invoice that when multiplied by the number of customers they have, more or less equates to their total income for the coming winter months, so they’re going to make the most of it. The really damaging part of this is that it usually involves a minimum of 3 tonnes (sometimes 5 or even 10 tonnes) of high sand top-dressing which can be the most damaging thing many clubs can do t o their greens.

Please make sure that any work being carried out on your green is actually doing some good before agreeing to any program.

And this brings me on to my second pet hate: “Closing the Green”,  or  the assumption that the green “hibernates” in winter. You see bowls is essentially a game that is played in summer and to achieve a surface anywhere near suitable we have to ask the soil and grass plants to undergo and put up with the most un-natural of processes; we hammer the green to death with foot and machinery traffic, cut the grass to within a whisker of its life and then expect it to miraculously recover over the winter with the minimum of intervention from us.

Yes you might well be familiar with this one too, but again, it makes absolutely no sense to me.

You would be forgiven for accusing me of negativity towards contractors and expect that I am going to sign off this piece as the president of a bowling club. However, it might surprise you to know that I am the owner of one of the most prominent bowling green contracting companies in Scotland. Am I cutting my own throat by saying this? I don’t think so,  because I’ve always taken the long term view when it comes to customer relationships. Making sure that my clients get real value for money over a long relationship with my company.

So my advice to club officials is: look out for the unsolicited “back end” renovation quote dropping through your letter box about this time. I simply don’t understand how any truly professional company can make an offer to carry out various options of autumn work, without taking the time to come along and inspect your green.

Secondly I would encourage you to make sure your contractor is preparing a thorough renovation program that stretches right through the winter months and culminates in a green specific Spring preparation program prior to the start of the new season. Anything less simply isn’t enough.

You see, the things we do to produce a surface during the bowling season are damaging to the grass plants and soil. We must ensure a full recovery for the following season and that means winter work.

The main issues to deal with are compaction which needs regular deep aeration right through the winter months; head recovery which again needs specialist work to repair the damage caused by continuous foot traffic; disease management, the winter being the most likely time for a devastating outbreak of fusarium disease and localised dry patch recovery. The winter work is a vital step in overcoming this common but damaging condition.

Please, if you do nothing else this winter have a proper appraisal carried out  on your green to make sure the work it really needs is done in time for it to recover fully for next year.

]]> http://greenmaster.co.uk/business/breaking-with-tradition-for-a-better-green/feed/ 0 http://greenmaster.co.uk/business/feeding-the-roses-with-pound-notes/ http://greenmaster.co.uk/business/feeding-the-roses-with-pound-notes/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:50:09 +0000 admin http://greenmaster.co.uk/?p=435

Most clubs have great looking roses!

I have lost count of the words I have written, conversations I have had and arguments I have inadvertently started about one of  greenkeepings’ greatest follies;  routinely top-dressing your green with high sand content top dressing composts year in and year out. During my greenkeeping career over 3 decades and during countless hours of research I have been amazed to find clubs where 5, 7 or even 10 tonnes of top-dressing is being applied every autumn.

The really tragic thing about this practice is that in every case the club are paying for a contractor to hollow tine (core) the green and then apply this material.

Let me ask you where the cores from your green go after they are lifted?

I would hazard a guess that you either spread them on the rose beds around the green or give them away to members for their gardens.

Now hollow tining is typically carried out to a depth of 100mm (4 inches) and usually only 10-15 percent of the core is unwanted thatch.

So that means that 85-90% of each core is made up of all of the expensive top-dressing you have been applying over the years. No wonder the roses look so good!

With top-dressing now costing around £130 per tonne, its easy to see how hundreds of pounds are wasted like this on nearly every bowling green in the UK every year.

In addition to this there are a lot of negative agronomic impacts associated with this practice.

Localised Dry Patch is exacerbated by excessive sand content. This causes areas of the green surface to become impervious to water and dry out completely. The end result is an un-healthy, bumpy green which becomes susceptible to disease, moss infestation and loss of grass cover.

This is just one instance of good money being thrown after bad at just about every bowling green across the land.

Now this is not to say that top-dressing is never required or isn’t a valuable tool in the greenkeepers arsenal. There are times when top-dressing is absolutely the right thing to do.

However, there is generally no need to blindly apply several tonnes every autumn, only to keep the roses looking good!

]]> http://greenmaster.co.uk/business/achieving-excellence-on-a-budget/feed/ 0 http://greenmaster.co.uk/business/don%e2%80%99t-ignore-your-greatest-assets/ http://greenmaster.co.uk/business/don%e2%80%99t-ignore-your-greatest-assets/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:30:04 +0000 admin http://greenmaster.co.uk/?p=419

Your greatest assets?

When asked to name their club’s greatest asset, most club members will without hesitation say “the green”.

As a green maintenance company you wouldn’t expect us to put up much of an argument against that now would you?

Well, of course the green is of major importance to all clubs, but when your club starts to take a more business focused view on management as described in my recent post (Taking a Business View for Success) of this edition you will soon realise that  your greatest assets are your “customers”. Yes I know its funny to think of your fellow members as customers, but the sooner you start to think this way the sooner you will start to reap the benefits that a business focussed club can bring.

In every industry, the businesses that look after their customers best are usually the most successful. High performance businesses look after their current customers, because they understand that getting new ones is 10 times more difficult and 10 times more expensive.

By adding as much value as you possibly can to a membership, you will soon see the difference this can make.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you can ignore everything else. Its important to have robust systems in place for every operational issue in the club, to ensure that the club runs as smoothly and as automatically as possible. By doing this you will free up more time to spend on looking for ways to keep your customers happy.

Its easy to ensure you have a great green for example; by using a service like The Bowls Excellence Network, you effectively put the green and its associated costs and worries to one side in the full knowledge that it is in expert hands.

Its possible to do this with many other aspects of club management too; bar and catering supplies can be dealt with by setting up similar arrangements with suppliers and dealing with the details in short monthly meetings to organise requirements in advance.

By working in this way you create more time to concentrate on forward planning and the important strategic issues.

Of course the most important strategic issue is Membership.

Success in attracting and retaining members can be greatly weighted in your favour by focusing on the benefits of membership like:

1.  Club Atmosphere

2.  Camaraderie

3.  Value for Money

4.  Competitive Success

5.  Events

6.  Facilities

7.  Added Benefits

8.  Junior Development

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