Agreed, I love people who post pretty dramatic claims but have no data to back it up and tell you to look it up if you don't believe them. But they'll argue all day that their right.
Why is my claim dramatic but his isn't?
He made a claim about mulching that was not true and posted no data to back it up. I posted a counter claim and somehow I'm wrong? That makes no sense at all.
There was a study written up about ten years ago in Grounds Maintenance magazine (IIRC) that took a look at the claims about mulching, comparing real world operations and lawns, using side discharge, bagging and mulching.
Mulching is poorly understood; and yet marketing of mulching mowers to consumers took off like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I mention this because I feel it lies at the heart of the wholesale misunderstanding of mulching specifically and handling of grass clippings in general.
Back to the study, it found the fuel use numbers that I mentioned. I did not believe these numbers, so I ran them myself. At the time my crews were mowing 64 acres of lawn a week so testing was not hard to do. My numbers were slightly different than the article, but close enough to validate it. I was a little surprised. We had been planning a big purchase of new mulching only mowers.
My next step was a two season test between mulching vs. bagging. Side discharge did not fit with the properties we maintained so it was not tested. My business was in the rather rainy PNW and I know my results reflect this. We found that overall mulching cost us more time and money than simply bagging all of the clippings. This factored in fuel, crew time for not only mowing but also clean up, pesticide applications per IPM, mower maintenance costs, handling of debris, and fall leaf clean-up. One problem we had with mulching was complaints about appearance and grass stains on concrete sidewalks and out crews had to spend alot of time preventing stains when mulching.
We also had to start swapping blades on mowers in the middle of the day when mulching instead of just every evening after the mowing day. During the spring/early summer rush of growth we had to mulch them every 4 days instead of the usual weekly rotation. If the weather was wet mulching took much longer than bagging. In short, mulching was cumbersome and expensive in our commercial operation that focused on high end residential and commercial properties.
Having said that I will defend mulching, it is useful. We used in on sports fields that had their own mowers assigned. We also used it on large non-formal grass areas. We tried it a few years later after we started adding PGR with the spring Pre-E weed treatment and found we could put formal lawns on a weekly schedule without degrading their appearance.
Anyway, there you all have it. I personally have in excess of $2,000,000.00 invested in learning what works between the two primary ways of dealing with clippings. I've just shared that with you all free of charge and at the expense of my time. If you believe it fine, you may benefit from what I paid to learn. Others that run commercial operations have found the same basic thing. Some have written articles. Many operations use mulching and have a business model that it works with it. Many of them would make more money if they stopped doing it, but they don't know.
If you still don't believe me it is your loss, you're free to wallow on in ignorance.
Mr. HE
