Push Mowers vs. Ride on Mowers

Hi Sally

Here's something else to throw into the mix: we have approximately 1/2 acre of lawn (commonly owned between 12 houses) which is now being mown with a rechargeable electric mower running on accredited greenpower. The lawn used to be bigger - I shrank it by planting native borders and now it looks a lot better. There are a lot of advantages to the electric mower - no fumes or vibration (damaging to nerves), much less noise,much less maintenance. Petrol mowers are some sort of cultural norm here but there's no practical reason for it.

Just to clarify, we're using a Victa Enviro-mower, but if you have a smaller area of lawn, you can use one of the cheaper battery-electric mowers around (sometimes ours has to be done in two chunks because of the size of the lawn and the length of the grass). Also to sing their praises, starting and stopping them are much simpler, and much safer than petrol mowers, and the pollution (local and from the power station) is way lower than a 2 or 4 stroke mower, even accounting for the inherent inefficiencies of grid-electric systems.

FOOD, NOT LAWNS: http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/foodnotlawns Particularly in be-droughted Australia I would think you would know this. There's far far more wrong with lawns than 2-stroke mowers, as disgusting as they may be.

Adam in noisy, smelly suburban Massachusetts, USA where our landlord has paved our modest garden and sod-patched this year's disappointed vegetables

Hi!

I may be wrong but I thought two-stroke motors for lawnmowers were slowly being fazed out in Canada. Even using a fast growing tree species like birch, you would still be looking at decades to get what I think you are looking for. If your short-term goal is to lose the mowing, then I would suggest either using mulch, or pebbles/rocks with some sort of barrier underneath (geotextile, newspaper, etc) to prevent grass regrowth. Then choose where you want to plant various species, remove the mulch there and plant. You won't be able to get a woodlands type planting right away because there will be more sun reaching the ground than in a more mature forest so typical understorey plants will get too much sun to thrive in your young forest. I guess you'll have to go through natural forest succession on your way to a woodlands. Sorry it'll take this long! I'm slowly doing it on my property and my wife and I figure she'll easily be retired before it's anywhere near where we want it to be.

Franois Blain
Cantley, QC

Be a little careful here. While grass has some very bad qualities, there are lot of studies that show if you replace grass w/ rocks or dark mulch, you get a fairly dramatic 'heat island" effect. This will increase the cooling load on the building - hardly a formula for a "green" retrofit.

Thanks & Adios,
CJD 

Carol J. Dollard, P.E.,
LEED AP Energy Engineer
[email protected]

Not to mention the (tiny) bit of insect and other life forms you wipe out when you eliminate plants.

Hello all,

This is a riveting topic as I'm doing this to my lawn right now. I am the only person on my street without a riding lawn mower and neighbours were a bit concerned when I ripped up half of the front yard last year to make a butterfly garden. I have decided this is the year I will be going for groundcover for the rest of the front - whether this will just be newspaper with wood chips on top or soil with sedum (or other), I'm not yet sure. I will be posting that question to the list in another email.

Cheers,
Holly
Kingston ON

We planted periwinkle and other "stepables" in our front lawn, we live in town, and the wild strawberries filled in the rest, it stays green year round, we never water and never mow.
 

RE: Does anyone know what sort of time duration and process it takes to convert lawn into a woods setting and not have to mow at all?! There are other alternatives depending on your site. For example, we're trying No Mow lawn on certain areas of our yard (a suburban yard, not a woodland type of place). A picture of our small test plot of No Mow is on my website at http://www.stewardshipgarden.org/conservation/lawn.html. More detailed info on No Mow is at http://www.for-wild.org/download/GrowItDontMowIt.pdf. Also, your yard can provide many more useful functions than just lawn (almost anything but concrete is more useful!) A good place to start is by reading Bringing Nature Home by Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware. The book is a science-based rationale for the importance of native plants to preserving biodiversity as well as an inspiring call to action explaining how our own yards are essential to this effort because of the increasing loss of natural areas to development. Other resources for learning more about habitat gardening are on our website at www.hgcny.org - choose Resources from the top menu.

Janet Allen

President,
Habitat Gardening in Central New York,
chapter of Wild Ones: Native Plants, Natural Landscapes
www.hgcny.org

Hi Adam,

Tell me about it. Our country's biggest agricultural product (so I recall reading somewhere so it might be true) - lawn grass. Water, fertilizer, petrol and parts for mowers, all that effort and labour, and the "product" is dumped into bins and hauled off in trucks to be disposed of. It's insane, and not in a harmless way either. Never mind the drought (actually we are still in the throes of La Nina - it's been wet for 18 months), the salinity, soil erosion, intrinsic low soil fertility and vast distances from farms to markets make the gratuitous waste of productive land just plain inexcusable. It will come to bite us sooner rather than later. In the meantime, my own tiny private garden has not an inch of lawn and I grow all the food I can fit in it. I'd be planting food in the communal garden if I could but I got enough hassle for planting native trees. Only last month one of the neighbours pulled out all the ones in front of his house, and replaced them with one scabby invasive weed. I think it's a cultural issue. The Mediterranean migrants here are famous for their food gardens but I don't know if their children and grandchildren are carrying on the tradition. I think there's a perception that buying all your goods and services is indicative of better quality of life.

Lorna Jarrett

I found this information in an article out of our Baltimore Sun paper yesterday: "Yet many people are unaware of the damage to the atmosphere caused by lawn care machines. They don't know that a lawn mower used for half an hour puts 10 times more hydrocarbons in the air than an automobile driven for the same length of time. A string trimmer is even worse, emitting 20 times more pollution than a car. But the worst are the blowers. Because their two-stroke engines burn a mixture of oil and gasoline, a grass or leaf blower puts 34 times more pollution in the air than the average car." Here is a link to the entire article: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.lawnmowers01may01,0,5296164.story Also, a link to the web-site of a local landscape architect who's specialty is converting lawns (both residential and commercial) to a "tapestry of low-growing plants". I can attest to her skill as I have seen several projects of her projects locally which are more than just tasteful(to please the concerned neighbors), they are really beautiful. Her web-site is: beyondlawn.net

Hope this is helpful!
Jessie Vahrenkamp