Just How Lazy Are We?
Literally out of no where this morning I was thinking about mowing lawns. Some may already know my particularly odd stance on this subject, but the more I thought about it; the more I needed to say something about it. I use a push reel mower. You can find them almost everywhere you can find gas mower. Let jump into why I use one of these “old school” mowers.
When ever I used my reel mower, people would stop and watch. They’re something of a mystery to most people. I guess some people thought we evolved past using them decades ago. After all, it’s more work to use a reel mower right? It starts with my neighbor commenting on my use of the push reel mower. Something along the lines, “It’s already enough work to mow the lawn. Why would use that to do it?” My reply somewhat baffled him, “How is this more work than pushing your gas mower around?” After a moment of attempting reasoning in his head, he replied, “Mine is gas”. It was at this point that I realized he had no concept of physics…
See, a push reel mower is considerably lighter than a gas powered blender mower. If your going to push something around, that cuts grass, you should use something light. It’s literally less work done by you. How about speed? Reel mowers are just as fast as gas mowers. It’s really amazing technology when you think about it. Now I know some of you are spoiled beyond belief. You have one of them fancy motorized mowers that lead you around the lawn. I’ll get to that in a minute. Needless to say, after I drew that comparison to him he was slightly more concvinced that a reel mower was alright.
Unsure of himself now, he asked me, “Doesn’t it take longer?”. My reply highlighted that all I had to do to get a reel mower ready to work was pull it off the wall. No gas to check, dried grass guts to unclog from the insides. They’re designed to work perfectly at a leisurely pace. I literally could zone out while mowing my lawn. This was the point when he looked at me; then, looked at the reel mower. The expression of understanding suddenly made sense and he said, “Cool!” That’s where that ended, but the reasons to use a push reel mower don’t end there my friends.
Now I realize this is really obvious, but I’ll point it out anyways. Reel mowers don’t use gas. Duh James! Most gas lawn mowers use a two-stroke engine still. This design is light weight and gives a fairly good amount of raw power. They all so burn more oil than your car does in it’s entire life time (pending any sort of abnormal car problems). They wear out fast (a result of the simple design and cheap manufacturing). They are inefficent (releasing as much as 40% of the gas out the exhaust). They’re all around one of the most polluting types of engines out there. All of that release directly into our atmosphere.
A good argument could be made that the overall effect of this is small. I mean, how could driving my car 600km be the same as running my lawn mower for an hour? To start, your car is designed to use as much gas as possible. Most modern direct injection engines waste only a small fraction of the gas and literally burn almost no oil. Compaired to your gas blender, which burns maybe 50% of the gas and burns 1/2 a cup of oil for every 3.8 liters of fuel. Your cars catalytic converter catches most of the bad stuff on it’s way out as well. Your lawn mower has a rusted out muffler to catch all that carbon.
Moving on, lets consider a different kind of pollution. Your out on your new deck, enjoying the warm summer sun with a cold beverage. Maybe your just soaking up the rays, or, reading a book. It’s your quite relaxation time that you rarely get in todays busy lifestyle. It’s at this point your neighbor decides that the length of his lawn is out of control and must be stopped. He pulls out his gas blender and starts the engine. What was a fairly relaxing time on your deck now has the roar and buzz of the grass blender. Some people may not mind this, but for me… I can’t relax when there’s the sound of a blade whipping chopped grass up. We call this noise pollution.
The push reel mower is not a silent killer by far, but it is significantly quieter. The worse sound it makes is when it hits a large stick. One a year it needs a bit of grease to keep the wheels and gears moving good. Otherwise it’s the sound of the rotor blades hitting the stationary blade. Kinda like the sound of someone sharpening a knife.
So I’ve covered most of the reasons I think reel mowers are great. There are a few more that I’ll just list:
- Materials costs are less, so there’s less to recycle/throw out when it does break beyond reasonable repair
- Top of the end reel mower costs about the same of a mid-grade gas mower
- You can still collect the clippings if you want to, they make reel mowers with bags now
- They don’t take as much space to store
Now that I’ve glorified the reel mower, I’ll discuss some things about it that are not so great. Probably the most agitating thing is that it’s not a gas power blender. You can just mow over everything and expect it to fly out in neat little pieces. Garbage needs to be picked up off your lawn before you use this mower (should you really be cutting chip bags into little pieces anyways?) Sticks larger than a pencil need to be removed. They jam the blades most of the time (I don’t advise taking a running start at them. You bend the stationary blade and usually miss some grass). That’s about all the problems I’ve had with mine.
Now for something completely different. Owning a house for me was like a social experiment. I could try different behaviors that related to my house and see how people reacted. One that I enjoyed, perhaps too much, was mowing my lawn at most twice a month. I discovered something very interesting about the grass we so love to look at (but never walk on, because that would be wrong). If you water it regularly, cut it regularly and fertilize it once and a while; it wants to grow faster. This is the look that many people refine over the years to have that perfectly carpeted yard of green. Most of these people don’t even allow their grand children on the grass (what a waste of the naturally soft green carpet!). It’s obviously a point of pride for people. Nothing says accomplishment like, “I have the greenest and fullest lawn on the street.” (Are they compensating for hair loss?)
First of all, mowing your grass weekly is a waste of power (both yours and maybe gas if your still using those things). Second, fertilizer creates a lot of nitrogen run off for the most part. It’s rarely correctly applied and results in a mess for the water treatment plants. Not to mention “precious” resource of water we use to encourage it to grow (so we can mow it again as soon as possible). Seriously, everything we do for lawns is mostly waste. Having a lawn itself isn’t bad, but devoting so much time to it is silly.
Oky, so we’ve determined why I would want to rock th boat on lawn care on my street. My plan started like so, first I stopped watering the lawn. I immediately noticed two things. First, my monthly water consumption dropped 30%. Second, my grass only needed mowing about twice a month. That wasn’t so bad, considering I was mowing my front lawn about 6 times a month before that. Now this bagging grass thing is somewhat confusing for most people. I guess they feel the clippings are waste; so, they belong in the garbage can. I guess these people are neat freaks and/or anal. These people are probably the same ones that find they need to fertilize their lawns or it just dies off. I guess common sense in the matter went out the window somewhere in the late 70’s (the epoch of gas mowers?) As it turns out, letting those clippings return to the same area they are from kinda sustains your artificial eco-system. They layer up, leech out their nutrients and decompose. Go figure that the grass clippings are made up the exact stuff you need to grow grass. Moral of the story, suck it up and let your clippings fall where they came from. They settle into the grass overnight and you never see them again. One exception to this is probably really long grass clippings. You probably want to bag or rake those up and throw them in your compost or something. They obviously don’t settle to well into the lawn.
Something else I noticed about mowing grass was, the less often you mowed it (as in, the longer you let it grow before you cut it), the slower it grew. When you trim grass down to a respectable level it has to start that new growth spurt again. It’s the fastest part of the growing cycle for grass. When you let it grow longer, it slows down. Letting your grass throw half a week more than usual saves you time and doesn’t look that horrible (my neighbor from across the street had a different opinion on that…) By the end of the summer I was mowing my lawn maybe twice a month. The grass health and green for the most part (there were some dead patches before I got there…)
Alright, so I’ve told you why I think push reel mowers are just as easy to use as gas mowers. I’ve told you why they’re better for the environment. I’ve told you how you can cut down on mowing your grass in general. Now I’m going to tell you, “Get rid of that grass”. Sure, this is all find and dandy. But what function does having a front yard of grass have. It’s all looks for the most part. We often don’t want anyone on it, so it can’t be used. If we’re going to have a front yard that has to look good, use something that doesn’t need water, fertilizer or maintenance. Use wood chips (often found for really cheap from tree trimmers). Rocks are fair less maintenance in the long run, but some area’s of town are not suited for that.
So, the moral of my rather long post is this. Let’s be less concerned about what our lawns look like, and spend some more time with our family and friends. Make that lawn of yours as low maintenance as possible. It’ll give you more time to enjoy life and help our friendly green planet to boot.
Some interesting links:
