Flipping things around

Instead of looking at how much the grass is growing, think of how much N it takes to produce that amount of growth

One can look at the growth of the grass, as approximated by the clipping volume, in a couple of ways. There’s the quantity of clippings – here’s how much the grass is growing. I think that’s the typical way to look at it.

But I find it useful sometimes to flip things around, and think about what produced that growth. Let’s say for a particular turf area, for an upcoming event, I want to have a clipping volume of about 15 mL/m2/day. Let’s say that’s the amount of clippings I want to produce for a monthlong duration. That’ll be about 450 mL/m2/month.

How much nitrogen (N) will it take to produce that much growth?

For creeping bentgrass, I expect that will be just over 1 g N/m2. To get that much growth on korai (all the pictures in this post are korai), I expect the grass will use about 1.5 g N/m2.

By knowing how much growth one wants, and about how much N it takes to produce that much growth, one can be a little more precise with the turf management.

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