After an hour’s rolling you will have a level and true cricket pitch, requiring but two or three days’ sun to make it hard and true as asphalt.  You may think you have killed the grass; but if you water your pitch in the absence of rain the day after you have played on it, the grass will not die.  It is chiefly in Australia that cricket grounds are treated in this way; they are dressed with mud off the harbours, and rolled simultaneously.  Such grounds are wonderfully true and durable.

If the pitch is naturally a clay one, it might be sufficient to use water only, and roll at the same time; but for renovating a worn clay pitch, a little strong loamy soil, washed in with water and rolled down will fill up all the “chinks” and holes.  It will make an old pitch as good as new.

The reason that nine out of ten village grounds are bad and bumpy is that they are not rolled soon enough after rain or after being watered.  Roll and water them simultaneously, and they will be much improved.

Another excellent plan is to soak the ground with clay and water, and leave it alone for a week or ten days before rolling.  Permanent benefit will be done to the soil by this method.  For golf greens and lawn-tennis courts situated on light soil, loam is an indispensable dressing.  Any loamy substance will vastly improve the texture of a light soil and the quality of the herbage.  Yet it is most difficult to convince people of this fact.  We have known cases in which hundreds of pounds have been expended on cricket grounds and golf greens when an application of clay top-dressing would have put the whole thing to rights at the cost of a few shillings.  One committee had artificial wells made on every “putting green” of their golf course, in order to have water handy for keeping the turf cool and green.  What better receptacle for water could they have found than a top-dressing of half an inch of loam or clay, retaining as it does every drop of moisture that falls in the shape of dew or rain, instead of allowing it to percolate through like a sieve, as is the case with an ordinary sandy soil?  Yet this clay dressing, while retaining water, becomes hard, firm, and as level as a billiard table on the timely application of the roller.

Those who look after cricket grounds and the like have seldom any acquaintance with the constitution of soils; they are apt to treat all, whether sand, light loam, strong loam, heavy clay, or even peat, in exactly the same way, instead of recollecting that, as in agriculture, a judicious combination will alone give us that ideal loam which produces the best turf, and the best soil for every purpose.  I am quite convinced that our farmers do not realise how much worthless light land may be improved by a dressing of clay or loam.  Such dressings are expensive without a doubt, but the amelioration of the soil is so marked that in favourable localities the process ought to pay in the long run.