ClipVol

I’ve been sitting on this idea for a long time, and I decided today would be a great day to write about it. You can decide if I’m serious. When we first study turfgrass management, we tend to learn a proactive approach.

In this post I’ve got something new and something old. Something new First, the new. I am going to start using a standard unit of mL/m2 to express the clipping volume.

I’ve recorded the narrative for another set of presentation slides. These are the slides I used for my presentation on this topic in Moncton last month. The audio I recorded today – this is what I talked about during that presentation.

I was in northern Idaho this week to participate in the Northwest GCSA Expo. I gave two presentations. In the first, Turf Around the World, I explained how the things I’ve learned as I have traveled around the world led to the way I’m thinking about turfgrass management right now.

It is really interesting, for me at least, to see how much grass grows. One way to put a number to how much grass grows is to measure the clipping volume of the grass mown from an area.

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.

The KBC Augusta tournament is coming up next week at Keya Golf Club in Fukuoka. The volume of grass clippings cut from the greens is measured every morning. I think it is interesting to look at the density of the measurements.

The standard for measuring how much a turf sward is growing is to take the dry weight of the clippings mown off the turf. This isn’t a realistic option for routine turf management because who has drying ovens?

Once upon a time,1 Paul Robertson asked if anyone was using a Pelzmeter to measure green speed. a long discussion followed, and the notifications on my Twitter account blew up.

When I read Jason Haines’ interesting post about clipping yield, soil mineralization, and disease rates and came to the part where he said measuring all the greens was more valuable than he expected, I was glad to read that.