As you walk past the smooth finish of the bowls club bowling green, does it remind you of the immaculate stripes of pre-season Wimbledon? Do you wonder how this perfection is achieved? Obviously the answer is a lot of hard work, but also good machinery. One important piece is the bowls club scarifier.

The scarifier that the bowls club currently operates is over 20 years old, It has become unsafe and is beyond economical repair; mechanical fatigue and non-operational failsafe devices (the dead man’s handle) have made the machine obsolete.

Why does the bowls club need a scarifier anyway? We have been informed that scarifying encourages healthy growth and keeps the appearance of the bowling green immaculate during the playing season.

Scarifying is also called thatching and it can remove large amounts of thatch and dead moss by digging deep into the turf. This ensures a good, flat – and therefore fast and predictable – surface.

A new scarifier is expensive (more than £6,000) and beyond the means of the bowls club. However, thanks to a grant from our own Fairfield Parish Council together with, hopefully, a Central Bedfordshire Ward Councillor Grant Fund award, the bowls club itself will only have to fund one third of the cost. So, look forward to seeing the new scarifier in action and cheering the bowls club teams on to greater success.