Bowling Green: Equipment List

The maintenance of a bowling green can be achieved with a range of hand tools and limited pedestrian operated machinery. Where budgets are generous then a wider range and number of equipment will be able to be provided for greens maintenance from day 1, however, a useful starting list is given below.
• Pedestrian cylinder mower, typically with 9 or more blades, and often with the rear roller being split into two or three segments to aid careful turning at green ends. Height of cut checking bar. Some mowers, e.g. Dennis FT510, have interchangeable cassettes (including a mower ¯ 10 bladed, scarifier, rotary brush, verticutter, shallow slitter, spiked roller, and more, and can be an ideal item of equipment for routine maintenance, however, additional deeper scarification and more regular deeper aeration will also be required, especially for renovation).
• Mower comb attachment, to act as a light version of verticutting, and which is very useful where a verticutting unit is not available.
• Scarifier: Mechanical and being capable of penetrating to 20-25mm.
• Aerator: Mechanical and being capable of penetrating to a minimum depth of 100mm and ideally having the option for interchangeable tines of slit, solid and hollow (e.g. SISIS Supaturfman). A dedicated punch action aerator with interchangeable solid and hollow tines may also be considered, however, slit tining is an important aspect of good greens maintenance and is needed to be carried out.
• A spiked roller.
• Dragbrush.
• Switch.
• Hand forks: Solid tines and a more specialist hollow tine fork.
• Besom broom.
• Wheelbarrow, shovel, lute, landscape rake.
• Dragmat for speedy incorporation of light top-dressing applications.
• Knapsack sprayer.
• Wheeled walkover sprayer is very useful where volunteer groundstaff would struggle and tire using a knapsack sprayer.
• Spreader for grass seed and fertiliser applications. Typically, this would be a cyclone type spreader, but a drop-spreader might also be used for more controlled application rates, albeit slower than a cyclone spreader.
• Straight edge, which could be just a 1.8m spirit level.
• String (50m), metal pins, paint brush.
• Long-handled edging shears.
• Hand shears.
• Sprinkler and irrigation hose (50m length, but this will depend on where the coupling point is). Automatic irrigation will be very beneficial but is not essential and may not always be affordable.