In springtime, the only pretty ring-time…
… I find my thoughts turning to thoughts of … lawns.
I’ve been doing something differently on our whacking great expanse of lawn here in New Jersey, in an older suburb (pre-Depression) that was made to be walkable! (Ah, those were the days — one car per household, which was used by the man of the house to drive to work or to the train staition… everybody else was forced to walk to and from the garden club, church meetings, grocer’s and butchers (or those folks delivered on a regular basis…) as a result of which, all the bloated out of shape bacon-bringers keeled over with apoplexy at age 51. Warms the heart to think of those good old days, eh?)
What I’ve been doing differently is cutting the grass. No, I’m not one of those lazy types who let it go to seed, gosh no. But until this season I’ve been using the power mower, a 5.5 HP Honda mulching mower that got very good grades. 21 inch deck or so, and infinitely variable speed settings. Cuts the grass in about 45 minutes, if I don’t bag it (and I usually don’t.)
What I am doing THIS year is using my old American-made push mower (made in Shelbyville, Indiana, in 1991 if memory serves.) This is the kind we remember from Dennis the Menace re-runs, forever pushed by Mr. Wilson around his puny Hollywood backlot yard. I won’t say the mower is entirely made of metal — the wheels are plastic and hence the gears and pinions that mesh with them are plastic, as is the roller, but nearly everything else on the mower is steel. I’ve tuned it a bit, even bought some valve-lapping compound at the local auto-repair supply store and back-lapped the blades according to the (English-language) manual.
It cuts pretty damn well! The lawn certainly likes it. Of course, most baseball fans and those who play golf will know that ML ballparks and golf courses are all cut with reel mowers. The slicing action causes less trauma to the grass blade than a rotary mower (which is just a large and very fast weed-whacker when you get right down to it) You can see the tips of the grass blades, each staying green where it was cut, whereas the pulverizing action of the rotary blade turns the top 1/16" of the blade brown, like wilting lettuce. Multiply that by 189,000X per 100 s.f. and you are talking about a perceptible difference in the shade of green you get.
But the real reason I am posting here and not on a gardener dweeb hotline is because of the exercise I get! I have a hilly lot and it takes a good burst of speed to get up hill with enough momentum and speed to keep the reel rotating fast enough to cut! I’m seeing it in my hams and calves as I bound up and down the yard. It takes me approximately twice as long to cut the grass, too (90-120 minutes vs. 45-60, and I cut every 3-4 days vs. every 6-7) so that’s more low-intensity cardio too. I’m surely working up a sweat (the fumes I emit must about offset the gas-exhaust I am avoiding, so I won’t claim any huge greenhouse gas emissions reductions) and I inspired a neighbor to buy a push mower for his own (much smaller) yard.
The crowning achievement? I’m at 211 today, down 6 pounds in about a month. I’m running a 5k on Wednesday and we’ll see how my time looks compared to last fall.
I’ll keep you posted.
Regards,
Beefgut
