"When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you!"—Grey Livingston
We have a push mower. I tried to use it once and it took me three hours to do a four by four patch of grass. That simply is not going to work. So I bought the next best thing today—An ELECTRIC mower!
Right before we left for our 10th year anniversary to Las Vegas, we had two defunct gas mowers in the garage (hand-me-downs circa 1970s probably) and an old weed wacker. My husband tried to weed wack our entire back yard, which is no easy feat, since our back yard in Seattle is quite large. He got half-way through the project and the thing caught fire, sputtered and died right there on the lawn. I could barely see his face through the white cloud of smoke that was between us. At that point I thought about tearing out the lawn completely. Actually, half of our front yard has now been converted to a stone Zen garden and it's not too shabby.
Anyway, we left the rest of the yard half finished and went off on our trip. Then life took over and before we knew it, the grass was practically up to our knees and we were becoming those neighbors that people whisper about. We were the eyesore of the block.
I couldn't take it anymore, so I bit the bullet and drove down to Sears today to look at mowers. My goodness, Sears had a lot of mowers. There were riders, side blowers, ones with Honda motors, mowers with attached catchers, mowers with gears, self-prepelled mowers—you name it.
All of these mowers the sales clerk showed me required gas with a special kind of gas stabilizer. Suddenly I recalled the fumes and white smoke from our weed wacker that exploded not too long ago and found myself saying, "Can you show me the electric ones?"
Off in a corner sat a rather large battery operated mower and one smaller one that required an extension cord. The price was right, but our sales clerk was surprised we were even looking at it. It was like we had entered a Harley shop and all we really wanted was the electric bicycle in the corner.
I didn't care. I was tired of white smoke, gas, yanking my arm out of the socket practically to start the darn thing. I wanted something simple, environmentally friendly, smooth and easy.
The best things about this new little mower are:
1. It's good for the environment
2. It is quiet, yet powerful
3. No need to pull any cord to start it, just plug it in and push the lever
4. It's inexpensive
5. It did a pretty good job on our knee-deep lawn
I ended up buying an electric weed wacker too, but ran out of zap at the end, so my husband said he'd try and weed wack later. He has really bad allergies, so I'm doing most of the mowing these days. Good thing this little machine is a snap to use! Here's a photo of our spruced up house. I love that it is in the city, but has so much foliage and trees around it:
Do you do your part for the environment? Have you worked in your yard or garden lately?
