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.
