Achieve The Perfect Bowling Conditions

Is your bowling club's green looking less green and a little more unsightly than usual? We discuss some of our top tips for maintaining a healthy bowling green from the start of the year to the end. Make sure you're mowing regularly Long daylight hours mean lots of play on the turf. It is advisable not to set the mower below 4.5mm. Between 4 - 6mm will be the optimum during June. Your groundsman will be mowing the green three or four times a week with some grooming, verti-cutting or brushing being undertaken on a weekly or twice weekly cycle to improve air movement and reduce thatch levels building up in the sward profile. We are having a spell of hot and sunny weather at the moment so it is important that you keep the green watered. Starting to mow your green (preferably from the beginning of the year) is the most critical operation when it comes to maintaining a healthy green surface. But before doing anything, you need to make sure that your mower blades are sharp, strong and in an overall good condition. Regular mowing will be required to maintain sward height at around 4-5mm. If you require your blades checking you can do this yourself, or you can give your local dealer a call to service your machine and sharpen your blades so your mower is in tip top condition. Aeration Aeration is key at this time of the year with the hot sunny weather we have around at the moment. The use of a sorrel roller to aerate the green will help reduce soil compaction, 'vent' the root-zone and to allow water to move quickly from the surface and into the root-zone, thus encouraging the turf to root deeper. Irrigation If soil profiles, particularly sandy soils, are allowed to dry out too much they often become water repellent, a state when soils can become difficult to re-wet. Often the first areas to suffer on greens particularly crown greens are the high spots on the green. You may need to spend more time hand watering these problem areas. Choose the right equipment Allett has been able to help bowling clubs over the country produce and maintain bowling greens that they are proud to play on. We have been able to do this by offering a range of mowers that can be your ideal bowls mower, along with additional accessories to ensure healthy and manageable growth throughout the year. The overall condition and performance of your bowling green will largely be determined by the amount of work that is put in by the groundsman, which is dependent on the resources used. The right equipment is vital to achieving a healthy green. At Allett, all of our machines are specially designed to work well with all types of grass. Our Allett accessories make light work of mowing by enabling you to add a number of attachments to your machine with incredible ease, meaning you widen your list of capabilities without having to widen your budget too much! We recommend the use of the Allett Tournament to help create world class bowling greens even at grassroots level. Comprising a series of closely-spaced vertical blades, the rotating grooming reel lifts lateral growth and “runners”, ensuring that all of the grass being mown is presented to the cutting cylinder in the correct manner (i.e standing up), making it the perfect bowls mower. The result is a consistently even and level finish that will be appreciated for sports where the roll and run of the ball are key e.g. bowls. To help produce the optimum cut, the Tournament mower is fitted as standard with a powered Turf Groomer positioned immediately in front of the cutting cylinder. It also has a 10 bladed cutting cylinder as standard which gives a more immaculate, finer precision cut. Another machine we recommend is the C20 or C24 range machine that gives you the option of inputting a variety of cartridges such as the turf rake cartridge for scarifying, the verticutter for getting rid of those horizontal grasses and an aerator for getting air into the sward (plus many more cartridges that can be found here) Take a closer look at all of the mowers that we have to offer in the PRO/sports range or find out more information on the variety of Allett accessories to give your grass the treatment it deserves! If you are still unsure about which mower would be best suited to meet your needs contact our specialist team here - we'd love to hear from you!