growth potential

This is one of those blog posts that I finally can move from the list of notes about what I might write about, to the published and completed section. > [2020-08-29 Sat] On my run this morning from […] to […] I was thinking that a little bit of quantitative like OM246, knowing nutrient supply, clipvol, it goes a long way in leading to improved turf conditions.

I sometimes talk about maximum N. You may have heard me refer to the standard amount of N. I discussed that with Michael Bekken in this ATC Doublecut episode. What do I mean by these quantities of N?

Randy from Bulgaria sent me this interesting question, which I paraphrase here: I was wondering is there a place on earth, where growth potential (GP) is above 90% for cool-season grass, or also a place where GP is above 90% for warm-season grass, all year long?

When a lot of nitrogen is applied relative to plant demand, I guess. The article Creeping bentgrass surface properties following aerification by Hubbard et al. reports the results of an experiment looking at various aerification treatments, tine diameters, and tine spacings on a `Crenshaw’ creeping bentgrass green at Clemson, South Carolina.

For any day in the year, one can calculate the cool-season grass growth potential (GPC3) and the warm-season grass growth potential (GPC4). These growth potential functions take the average air temperature as the input and return a GP value on a scale of 0 to 1, or 0 to 100% if you prefer.

This note below, about the temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP), has been sitting in my blog_posts.org1 file for a while now, as one of those topics to write about sometime. When I read the note I jotted down when I created this entry, I realized I wouldn’t have to do much to turn this into a blog post.

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.

The temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP) is a utility function that rescales the temperatures that the grass is growing in. Rather than the temperature scale, the GP is a unitless scale from 0 to 1 (or from 0 to 100%) that expresses how close the average air temperature is to the optimum temperature for shoot growth.

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.