What a year of mowing adds up to

When you measure the clipping volume, one of the many valuable things you can do is sum the measurements from each mow to get the annual total.

When you have the annual total, you can start adjusting the growth up and down to produce more consistent surfaces.

Surfaces thinner than you want? Probably need to grow a bit more grass. Too much thatch? Probably can grow a bit less. Conditions were ideal one year? Adjust the growth rate to match that year.

There’s an article at PACE Turf about Lord Kelvin and green speed. It mentions the importance of growth rate, how growth rate has obvious affects on green speed, and how managing growth rate is the crux of the whole grass growing business. We can manage the growth rate by feel. We can do it by experience. Another option, as mentioned in the PACE Turf article, is to:

supplement our feel and experience by putting a number to the growth rate. We can put a number to the growth rate by measuring the clipping volume.

That’s where a famous quote from Lord Kelvin comes in. You may have come across Kelvin’s dictum before: “when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

Knowing how much grass was harvested each year lets us express growth in numbers. Then we know something about it.