ClipVol

I enjoyed listening to my friends Dave Wilber and Kevin Ross in their TurfHead Jam Session this week. They’d put out some teasers that they would be discussing #ClipVol, so I made sure to listen as soon as the podcast came out, to see what these industry veterans had to say about that.

Jason Haines has been sharing some ideas on his Turf Hacker blog, and one that I think is especially interesting is the idea that one can precisely match the topdressing sand quantity to the growth of the grass.

A full year of putting green clipping volume measurements looks like this. Well, it’s like that with a number of caveats. This is what it looked like: at this location 21° N latitude with seashore paspalum turf managed the way it was with the weather of the past year growing in the soil conditions of this site irrigated with this water etc.

This week I’ve thought of a couple things about #ClipVol. First is the way I think of the data. I’ve shared a lot of charts about clipping volume, and as this growing season gets underway in the northern hemisphere, I wondered if I could describe it on an animated chart.

Yesterday I led a webinar for TurfNet about clipping volume measurement. The video recording of the webinar is here. The static slides (no audio) are here. The #ClipVol hashtag is a convenient way to find a lot of discussion and examples of this technique in practice.

This is a friendly reminder that the information here can be obtained automatically by RSS or email every time there is an update, and then can be read or deleted at one’s leisure.

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.