18 thoughts on “Proudly Doing Our Own Yard Work Since 2011”

  2. I have always been of the opinion that lawn mowing should occur during the middle of the day, when most of the folks are out of the neighborhood. The alternative, of picking a nice Sunday afternoon just seems dreadful for everyone involved.
    (In our neighborhood, it’s the rain, and the limited number of appropriate periods of time to do the mowing. It interacts badly with any other schedule of activities, thus making doing one’s own lawn a bad choice for anyone whose paying job it isn’t).

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  4. “I’m loving the evidence that Laura is really enjoying her windows, though.”
    Yeah, I was noting the window, too.

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  5. LOL, we don’t have a housecleaner, but we do have a lawn service! Part of it is because my husband is allergic to grasses and all sorts of outdoorsy stuff, and I refuse to mow. Now I have to develop an allergic to dust or cleaning products or something as an excuse to get a housecleaner. 🙂

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  6. If you have a son above 10 years old, you don’t need anyone else to cut the lawn, do you? That’s what my parents thought, at least. Even repeatedly chopping of the heads of the sprinklers couldn’t get me out of having to mow the lawn.

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  7. “If you have a son above 10 years old, you don’t need anyone else to cut the lawn, do you?”
    Hey, that’s why I don’t mow lawns anymore, or require anyone who doesn’t choose to do the work for pay to do it.
    (The logic works with 10year old daughters, too, or at least it worked that way for parents in the olden days)

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  8. Our rental house has been a sort of training-wheels version of home ownership. First lesson learned with regard to lawn care: once you buy a reel lawn mower, the lawn suddenly triples or quadruples in size. Second lesson: a plug-in electric mower is kind of a pain on a lot with many trees–you spend huge amounts of mental energy on figuring out how to weave between the trees and not run over your own cord. I expect we’ll get our third mower (probably something with a battery) when we finally buy a house. If anybody knows that this is a bad plan, please tell me now, because there are only so many mowers we can afford to buy. (We really want a robot mower eventually.)
    Of course, during our lengthy drought, we went with the earth-friendly option (i.e. the cheap one) and just let everything die. The lawn hasn’t needed to be mowed in months.

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  11. I have never used an electric or reel mower, so I don’t know for sure how big of a yard they would cover, but I’d guess smaller than 1/8th of an acre. At a full acre, a riding mower isn’t ridiculous and at about two acres it gets hard to do without.

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  12. I should add that my information it’s a but dated. I have not mowed a lawn since ’93 or so. It just seemed very odd that you did not mention the kind of mower that nearly everybody uses.

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  13. It’s nice to have a quieter mower that you don’t have to fuss with fuel for. Anyway, it’s been a learning experience. I grew up in a lawn mower free home (the cows just grazed right up to the deck), so I’m just making this up as I go along.
    Here’s a review for a battery-powered mower that is supposed to do 1/3 of an acre on a charge. It sounds kind of fussy (flat lawn, grass not too high, etc.):
    http://landscaping.about.com/cs/lawns/gr/mulching_mowers.htm
    The robot mowers are still a work in progress:

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  14. We have a plug in mower. The cords are some trouble, but not a whole lot, and gas just seems to need too much maintenance. As noted, it’s gotten a lot easier for me since my sons got to their teens…

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  15. I was always told that electric mowers could only cut a couple of inches of grass and that reel mowers are even worse. As I could have out of date information, but I thought gas mowers let you delay mowing longer.

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  16. I used to mow the lawn of a woman who had an electric mower, and it cut the grass fine. (I do think I did it once a week, though.) I did run over the cord, cutting it, at least once, and my father had to splice it back together w/ electrician’s tape. A battery might be better. As for the robots, I love my roomba, but I wonder about lawn cutting. Could you keep it in the desired area? Would it go over and over most of the lawn, but leave some annoying patch uncut? As for me, I think a “wild” lawn is really the way to go.

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  17. “Could you keep it in the desired area?”
    The ones I’ve heard of are kept in bounds by a sort of invisible fence system of underground wires, like people have for dogs. Installing the wires is supposed to be the most time-consuming and annoying part of the deal.

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  18. I’ve done overgrown lawns with an electric – you just take smaller slices, can’t sail through taking the full 22 inches. You do have to watch your cord. On the other hand, it’s my experience that gas mowers need a lot more maintenance, and there’s all that shlep getting them started.
    If you have a big lawn, gas is probably worth it. Ours are small, and we can zip them out with the electric.

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