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You can use electric mowers. They solve the belching fumes problem and nothing else.
They’re often pretty quiet too.
Get an automatic/self-driving one, and you can just watch your vegetation be mutilated instead of doing it yourself.
Yep, electric “Roomba” style lawnmowers exist.
Lol that sounds like a device that would mutilate the plants growing beside the grass too… like my precious strawberries
I’m pretty sure you need to set up an electric grid on the property for it to follow.
Like the pet “invisible fence”.
That, or GPS, but they’re more expensive
Adam Savage exploring Makitas autonomous lawnmower R&D facility
Yeah mine runs over stuff a bit much for that…
Yeah, and they’re super common too.
Husqvarna 115H! It’s down to like $600 now. This is going on its 3rd year doing my backyard, and its fking amazing. Once a month I trim the perimeter, but otherwise I dont have to mow most of my yard now, its always the same perfect height, the grass seems much happier with it too.
My elderly neighbor got one and it’s quite fun to watch it tootle around his yard.
One of my neighbors has an electric one and it’s shocking comparing how quiet it is to the gasoline one that came with my house
A small robot apocalypse!
Up until last year I didn’t even know people in my country even still had petrol lawn mowers. I wanted to get one of those things that’s not even powered, just a rolling blade cage.
Reject modernity. Return to scythe.
look at mr. fancy pants here, thinks they’re too good for a regular old sickle huh?
Those are two entirely different tools with entirely different purposes. Sickles are good for harvesting small parts of plants, not mowing large swathes.
yes it’s almost like that’s the joke!
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Look at Mr rich pants here, needing a ride on petrol mower. Most people round my way have small push along electric mowers.
Petrol lawnmowers come in push along models too. Before they had electric, that was the only type. It’s not fancy.
And before the petrol mower there was the mechanical reel mower. My grandfather had one of these beauties. They take a bit of extra care and maintenance (sharpening, cleaning, oiling) but they do a great job and are much easier to push around than you’d think! Super lightweight and much safer around kids and pets too. Plus they’re basically silent compared to those extremely loud engine varieties (petrol and electric)!
My grandfather had one of these! I really enjoyed mowing my grandparents’ lawn with it as a child.
They’re so difficult to mow a lawn with. I don’t envy the people that need(ed) to utilize these.
They’re terrible if they’re poorly maintained. A well maintained and sharpened one is very easy to mow with. The blades cut the grass like scissors!
Mine was brand new and didn’t cut shit. Any sources on how to maintain one?
YouTube! Search for reel mowers.
Even brand new they can be bad if they’re not properly made or adjusted at the factory. Think of a pair of scissors where the blades don’t make good contact. Couldn’t cut newspaper with that!
The post says you “you drive it” while you could say that for a push along it seems odd wording.
Before they had electric, that was the only type. It’s not fancy.
True that they did exist in the past, however unless you’ve got an old one they’re around twice the price of electric and more expensive to run. But, more than that, it points to you having enough garden to need petrol.
Definitely not more expensive here. We just had to replace ours on a budget and the affordable ones were all gas, over $150 less than the electric ones. Would’ve loved an electric one instead but it was a no go this time.
How odd, here an electric will be £100-£150 and petrol you’re looking £250+
'Murica 🥴
Ahh, that’s fair. I didn’t read that properly. It does say drive.
I used to think lawns were dumb but then I moved to a place where if you don’t take care of your yard, it’s just overrun with bugs and weeds. Planting too many trees makes things damp and miserable, open areas are key, but that’s where stuff grows. Most plants can’t survive being mowed, but grass loves it, and the birds can pick out insects when it’s low. So now I like lawns, it’s the human version of a meadow. And I don’t see an alternative, other than growing an extra long beard, converting myself in mud, and becoming a druid
And I don’t see an alternative, other than growing an extra long beard, converting myself in mud, and becoming a druid
I don’t understand. Are you implying that’s not the obvious solution here?
It depends on how much lawn you have, too. If you’re sitting on a quarter acre (1000 square meters), then just mow it. You don’t want bug habitats literally on top of your house.
If you have five acres, you can probably leave a good chunk of it as natural. Mow the stuff closer to your house, and whatever you want to be able to use, and leave the rest. Maybe take a scythe to it every once in awhile.
I used to have about five acres and would only mow the area around my house. But when I went to sell it the realtor said I had to mow all of it because it looked “messy.”
Dumbasses want to move out to the country and live in a damn suburb smh
To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)
I would wager that the majority of people posting about lawns that require maintenance don’t actually own a home with one or are forced to do said maintenance by their parents.
The native plants that can grow in my lawn are not appealing so if I were to just let it go wild I would have a shitty looking, pest riddled, brown, half-dirt/half sticker mess that my kids can’t play on. We have beds where we can make them work but I do not have the time, money, or inclination to make it fence to fence flora. Also the most common bugs we get are mosquitoes and I would rather not encourage them any more.
Why not just fill it with gravel, put a few planters in if you still want some vegetation and then move on?
Ah yes, let’s take the low life area and make it 0 life
OP is literally saying they want less life… I wouldn’t consider an artificially manicured patch of grass to be much life anyway. The overgrown druid land OP describes sounds much better to me
So close and yet so far
Let’s take the low life area and make it no life area
This is quite nice in desert areas, but doesnt work well for areas like Florida where if you dont spend hours weeding or edging religiously, you’ll end up having to weedwhack your lawn because the grass and weeds have still grown, but now your mower has turned iinto a rock flinging machine with very dull blades
A yeard can be great space for kids to run and play, but still, fuck lawns for the most part. One basketball-court-sized lawn per couple blocks is plenty sufficient for kids. A soccerfield per 5 miles, and a major sports field per 10 miles…
Folks should let their yards be what the yards are in the wild.
In Florida, that means pine/oak forest with palm fronds. Maybe small grassy garden if folks want a spot to hang. But grass for the most part is shaded out by trees and covered by pine-straw and leaves.
Residential half-acre-plus fertilized lawns are stupid AF.
Maybe was cool in the 1950s when lawncare was a handy mode of wealth redistribution for a healthier economy, and no-one had thought of the negative environmnetal impacts.
Lawns used to be a big flex specifically because it took crazy labor to do; lords would show off how many gardeners they had under employ. Now folks are flexing in how they can kill everything including their wallets, free time, and planet
Push mowers are superior for small lawns.
Mowing lawnbots are the future for lawncare.
I’ve planted clover and creeping thyme and wildflowers in my garden. I have a reel mower that I push at highest setting over the clover when it has a growth spurt.
I happy with my decisions.
i mean you don’t have to pick grass to be the lawn you have, unless you live in a HOA that requires it
Places like Maryland did away with that nonsense. It is possible if neighbors are willing to come together and fight for it.
Get a push mower. It’s insane how much better it is in every single way. There’s no reason at all to push a 2 stroke across your lawn after paying for gas and getting it to star. You just quietly glide over that grass quiet. And some have a bag too.
Nah, get an electric mower, best of both worlds. Quiet-ish and still faster than an old push mower. No gas or mixing or worrying about it starting every season, just like the push mower except as labor saving as a gas
Nah, throw your mower in the bin and let your yard return to nature.
Sadly, that’s not an option for me until I can get enough allies to take over my HOA board and then proceed to dissolve it.
Sure, then I can pay for a mower or two in city fines every year!
I’m not against this.
worry about it starting every season
Honda. Any mower with a Honda engine will start first time every time
Just to be pedantic, mowers are 4-stroke because they need torque, not speed
Things like chainsaws are 2-stroke
glide
Idk what push mowers you’ve used, but mine did not “glide” whatsoever. It was incredibly difficult to push through the lawn and mow, and took much longer because of it.
You gotta sharpen the blades, my man, and keep the two moving parts oiled, this can be done at home with a very small can of oil and a large file that will fit in your sharp utensils drawer.
In my whole life, mowing the lawn was fun exactly once.
It was the first time that I got to mow the lawn at the house that I just bought. Every other time Ive had to do it, it sucks.
That’s once more than for me.
I definitely would not call it fun by any stretch, but mowing is tolerable to enjoyable for me. I’ve got an electric self propelled and a podcast, and I’m done in like 25-35 min. If anything it’s more annoying to break out the trimmer to get the edge stuff then lower can’t get, but I also only mow like once a month (to keep the city happy )so I don’t do it often enough to be annoyed by it.
I’ve got a reel mower and lawn cutting doubles as exercise without noise or cables or bags. Just have to do it regularly.
But then, I also don’t water my lawn, so it’s dormant for large parts of the year, like nature intended.
Nature intended my yard to be mixed hardwood forest.
How do you get the edges where the mower won’t cut? Still with a gas/electric trimmer or is there something manual that would work?
The manual options are ancient - like a sickle, or a scythe or clip by hand with garden shears bent down on your knees for hours. But fuck all that, you’ll want an electric trimmer for edges.
You can get long handled edging shears to save your back if you want to keep with manual tools.
Two things: I’ve edged my grass with pavers fir the most part, and for the small bits that don’t have that, long handled edging shears you can use while standing.
The other bit is that I don’t have a rolling lawn that needs a riding mower; my grass is interspersed with local plants/shrubs/trees. Only takes 10 minutes to fully trim the grass bit during the season where it’s growing.
We have an edge made with weed mat which we can mown over so the mower can do it all
Lawns are one of those things we do without thinking about it because it’s what everyone else has.
If you have space for a lawn, why not turn it into something beautiful and productive like a garden?
Oh, because your neighbors will get made at you for being different.
Oh, because your neighbors will get mad at you
for being different.because MuH pRoPeRtY vAlUe!!Change the narrative. Tell them their property value will plummet because lawns were shit fads that are going out of style.
Homeowner’s Association moment
If people see more value in a patch of drying grass rather that a productive garden, how could they be trusted with enough money to buy a house ?
I think it’s more so that people don’t have the time for a productive garden. There are certain times of the year that my small garden becomes the workload equivalent to a part time job.
With composting, weeding, killing squash bugs, seeding, planting, harvesting, and pickling… I can see why people opt to do something less time consuming.
Man, guy behind us has a beautiful garden. Just a little plot, probably a quarter acre, but it looks so much nicer than the plots on either side. More functional, too.
It’s the other way around for me, I don’t know anything about pruning… one of my neighbors cross over to my side to have a chat, and asks, “new home owner, huh?”… I instantly laughed and admitted that owning a home is a HUGE learning curve. You either learn how to maintain your property inside and out, or you pay out the ass to have someone else maintain it. No other option, unless you want to be that neighbor that everyone hates.
I like the way my backyard looks with all the clover and stuff for ground cover, but it also makes it almost impossible to enjoy it. The amount of insects and stuff that fly in my face or bite me while I’m out there just makes me miserable. I didn’t have this issue when it was just mowed down grass.
Do you have any trees back there? If so, the next step is to build bat boxes to attract bats to live there. They will eat those abundant insects and be very happy! Eventually it should become less annoying!
I agree with you, a bat box or a birdhouse for insectivorous birds.
A battery powered thermacell insect repellent will work in the meantime to keep many insects away while you are outside at least.
The only tree is marked to be cut down because it is dying/dead, and we are just waiting on the landlord to get to it.
Ahhh okay. Another approach to insect control (that doesn’t rely on trees) is a predatory bog. Loads of predatory plants as well as water with (insect / amphibian) predators of mosquitoes and flies.
Can be quite beautiful and special!
I’m jealous, I miss insectlife. Rarely see anything living anymore.
Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.
You could do what I did:
- only buy a house in a place that has no HOA
- xeriscape the front, let most of the back just grow out wild, and keep a small patch of grass in an area where you like to chill (for me this is in a courtyard)
- use an old school push mower for this small patch. You get a little exercise with this, but not enough to ever stress ya, and it requires no gas, no oil, no electricity and barely ever any maintenance.
let most of the back just grow out wild
This, but native plants instead.
That’s exactly what grows out wild in my backyard here (which is against the edge of a greenbelt / drainage creek bed) - no intervention needed.
This sounds lovely
My parents always had lawns but always had a battery powered mower. They currently have a small lawn that continues to their neighbor’s yard that they’re planning to replace with something more eco-friendly & drought-tolerant.
I remember my parents were early adopters in 2011 so we had an electric mower that wasn’t battery powered, you would actually have to plug it into the outlet. I remember going to school one day in the 3rd grade, we were assigned to talk about the chores we did around the house, I said that I liked to plug the mower into the outlet and mow the lawn. I got docked 50 points because the teacher didn’t believe my lawnmower was electric. “Are you sure you don’t crank it?”
Recently bought an electric plug in mower. 100 ft extension cord and it can reach every end of the area I keep mowed.
Was considerably cheaper than an equivalent gasoline operated one and I don’t have to store/worry about gas. The cord is a very minor inconvenience comparatively.
I also have an electric mower and honestly that cord drives me fucking insane. There are many things in my yard that it can - and does - get caught up on.
I guess it really comes down to the shape of the yard! I do have 2 decent sized trees but I can get around them without much issue.
Those electric mowers have been around for 50+ years.
I tried buying a plug in mower like that around that era. But the electric at the house we rented at the time was awful, so every time I plugged in the mower, the breakers would flip. Had to return the thing unused and bummed an old gas mower instead.
A plug in mower? Hopefully the cable was orange or something, that sounds risky.
My great-grandparents had an electric mower in the 80s. I never saw anyone else with one until the 2010s.
This is the way I’m doing stuff. I only have electric yard tools, and really only mow when I have to for the city. I’m hoping to replace most of my front lawn with garden beds over the coming years!
I currently only have hand powered yard tools aside from the gas powered lawnmower that came with the house. As long as you stay on top of the pruning hand tools get the job done. I discovered a 20+ foot tall tree hiding in a larger pine when I went to pull a vine off of it and still managed to chop it up with the handsaw for normal city collection. Poured some stump killer on the stumps and one full spring later (I did this at the end of winter when it was nice and cool out, and everything was still dead/hibernating) only one stump shows any signs of life out of the 4 trees I chopped down, and it might even just be a new shoot.
As long as you stay on top of the pruning hand tools get the job done
Ah, you’ve hit me with my ADHD kryptonite, remembering to regularly do (and actually completing) normal tasks like that.
I happen to have family members with birthdays in early March and early April, so I just remember to time it between those two dates. Y’know because just going “it’s March it’s time to cut back the weeds!” Isn’t enough
I also do a daily bike ride around sunset, and I try to do a very quick walk around the yard before/after which gives another opportunity to grab thr loppers and chop a couple of things that are growing in a bad spot
Taking notes from Saltburn?
We have a nice wee patch for our daughter to play on that we maintain with a push mower. No extra power needed. Very satisfying.
i have a reel mower. until i can completely subvert my lawn, i don’t need to tolerate the smoke and noise, at least.
