Cumulus Support

I have a too large garden for the usual walk behind mower, but it's a little too compact for a ride on tractor, but a ride on is what I use because it is quicker, more convenient and seems to use less fuel anyway - usually that is, unless the ground or grass is too moist...

When the ground is too wet, it is fairly obvious from walking on it, but I only find out the grass has too much moisture content once I get the tractor out and try cutting and it chokes up with grass cuttings and need to be poked clear. A quick fly round on the tractor becomes a series of jumping on and off, starting and stopping, plus clearing its discharge with a stick.

I have a weather station, which records temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind, so a useful function would be a little dial showing how dry my grass is, and how likely an attempt to cut it might prove to be successful. It needn't be that sophisticated, just a simple gauge of likely wetness.

My tractor discharges it's cutting blown along a narrow duct out the rear of the cutting deck, up and over the rear axle, then out to a large container on the rear. That duct is the part which chokes.

Grass dryness would also depend on grass length and lawn exposure (not to mention your blade size, cutting efficiency and cross section area of the duct you mention), so it might be tricky to have a dial that could provide useful results. You may benefit from doing some analysis of your weather data, with emphasis on temperature, dew point, wind speed. Solar data would be useful too. There are plenty of resources on the internet covering this topic.

freddie wrote: ↑Tue 04 Oct 2022 3:03 pm Grass dryness would also depend on grass length and lawn exposure (not to mention your blade size, cutting efficiency and cross section area of the duct you mention), so it might be tricky to have a dial that could provide useful results. You may benefit from doing some analysis of your weather data, with emphasis on temperature, dew point, wind speed. Solar data would be useful too. There are plenty of resources on the internet covering this topic.

Yep, I appreciate it's not an easy one and grass length plus growth is very variable depending on the previous weeks of weather. This past summer has been a great fuel saver, in that it has been able to last for weeks without needing to be cut, due to their being no growth, simply because it was too dry to grow. I just have in mind some sort of rough indicator of whether it would be worth having a go at cutting it. Basically, a practical use for all the data I am collecting.

A Leaf Wetness Sensor maybe?
It sited right it might emulate a reading similar to the wetness of the blades of grass.
Soil Moisture could indicate when it's wet & boggy.

Phil23 wrote: ↑Wed 05 Oct 2022 8:31 pm A Leaf Wetness Sensor maybe?
It sited right it might emulate a reading similar to the wetness of the blades of grass.
Soil Moisture could indicate when it's wet & boggy.

An idea I came up with long before I ever bought a weather station - was to have a go at building something to measure the soil resistance close to the surface, but I chucked the idea out as possibly the resistance would be too variable due to other factors.

Surface wetness is obvious, and easy to detect, simply by walking on the grass, what I really need to know is how moist the grass itself is, which is where I thought my weather station might be able to help.