How do fields of grass just reach a certain length and stop growing? No one is mowing these wild fields.
In: 2
If the weather is warm enough, grass keeps sprouting. Generally, the cutoff point comes when temperatures drop below 50°F during the day. Usually, that’s late October or early November, but some warm areas may push that date back to the beginning of December.
If you put a thin straw in a water-basin, the water would rise in the straw higher than the waterlevel of the basin. The thiner the straw, the higher the water could rise.
Since the “straw” needs to be thinner and thiner to get the water higher and higher, there is a point of diminishing returns, where the amount of water you can get through the straw is miniscule due to the small radius of the straw.
Plants use this hydrostatic flow to transport water and, with the water, nutrients / macromolecules from the ground up to the stoma in the leaves. Additional you have root pressure from the roots and a transpirational pull from the water evaporation in the stoma.
But a grass plant can’t get water as high as a tree with e.g. more leaves = more evaporation preasure.
I believe there are even more factors, but I can’t remember. Maybe the cells that make up the “straw” or tunnel (xylem) are different in grass and bigger plants. But I’m not sure.
All plants have a cycle where they grow, develop leaves and roots in order to collect carbon dioxide + water and rearrange those atoms into sugar (and oxygen) through photosynthesis, and chain the sugars together to form cellulose which forms the body of the plant.
But the “point” of all this is to develop flowers and then fruits and then seeds. The plant has the capability to regulate itself and respond to the environment (temperature, levels of rain, etc.), and basically “stop” once the end goal of “seeds” has been accomplished.
Corn is a grass where we allow the full cycle, because we want the seeds. Corn grows to a certain height, makes seeds, then the plant dries up / dies off. Lawn grass, on the other hand, we mow every so often, “resetting” its cycle; the plant keeps trying to produce flowers and fruit and seeds but we just cut it up and reset it back to just leaves. So it keeps trying, because DNA basically tells it to.
So basically the answer is that growing to a point and then stopping is the “natural” “behavior”, and the mowing is the artificial behavior where the grass is forced to grow and grow and grow “all over again”.
As an 11 year golf course grass monkey, i have no idea what stops growth beside, cold, heat or lack of water, pesticides or way too much fertilizer will also kill it. For optimum growing conditions, a combined day and night temp of 140°-150°, a modest amount of water… thunderstorms are great because you get free water with air in it…(i cant spell the smart word for that), and proper granulated fertilizer to strengthen the roots and or green it to help growth.
If you let it grow it stops after it produces seeds. The tips of the grass turns to seed heads.
Just like all plants have a “mature” size, so does grass. It will grow until it’s mature and then it will stop putting it’s energy into growth and start putting it’s energy into seeds or root systems or suckers.
Latest Answers