ClipVol

Measuring the growth rate by clipping volume. Really.

My books about greenkeeping, turfgrass science, clipping volume, and MLSN.

For a few years now, when I have private discussions about the type of putting green maintenance that involves few or no holes punched in the surface and minimal sand topdressing, I often hear this response.

I’ve been recommending the growth ratio as a way to check the observed (measured) growth of the grass at any particular time of year. The clipping volume on its own tells you how much the grass is actually growing.

This is a common question. I heard another one recently, too. “How big of a bucket should I get to measure clipping volume?” I like to answer these questions by looking at the site-specific conditions.

Many podcasts go on for hours. Mine often do. But this one is only 20 minutes, and for information density—a lot of useful insight in a short time—this particular episode is hard to beat.

A pound of nitrogen. That’s a substantial amount of N, right? Apply a pound of N in a single application and that’s going to create a lot of growth—way too much growth in most cases—and may lead to some thatch production.

I use the turfgrass growth potential (GP) all the time. I make use of the GP for all kinds of things, like predicting sand topdressing amounts, comparing locations, predicting nutrient use, checking overseeding dates, estimating mowing requirements, and many more.

On November 2 & 3, I’ll be at the Portuguese Greenkeepers Conference in Porto. You can register for the conference at the APG website. Here are three quick notes. 1. The five exciting topics I’ll be discussing I’m going to lead a series of short seminars at the conference.

One way that I like to look at clipping volume measurements is to plot the cumulative amount of clippings collected. This enables one to compare clipping amounts year to year.