turf speedo

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the turfgrass speedo. And I’ve been checking my calculations to make sure I’ve got a somewhat standardized method to get the speedo number for any day.

I’ve been looking at some growth ratio data, and I’ll share a few ideas here. Jason Haines introduced this as the turfgrass speedo, and I think that’s a good name for it.

This can seem a bit abstract, the whole growth ratio thing. In this post, I go step-by-step through the reasoning behind this, and explain exactly which problem this solves. There’s a common question that people have when they start measuring the exact amount of clipping volume.

A question came up about optimum clipping volume and whether that quantity of clippings changes by season. That amount must change for any location at which there are seasonal changes in the weather.

The amount of nitrogen (N) supplied over a certain time duration, compared to a standard amount, is what I call the genki level (GL). And the amount of clippings harvested over a certain time duration, compared to a standard amount, is what Jason Haines calls the turfgrass speedo.

In part 2, I showed how the ratio of N applied to standard N gives an indication of how much one is pushing the grass to grow. I call that the genki level (GL).