With almost nine acres to manage and no grazing animals to help, there is quite a bit of grass cutting of one sort or another to be done. I’m pretty sure we’ll be returning to this subject in the future – lots of times. But today is a ‘special’ day because I finally succumbed and bought a proper lawnmower. I’m sure a few people will wonder how we managed for the last two years, but we are quite good at just managing with what we have. Anyway when it comes to cutting the grass, we have a range of other tools to suit the variety of types of grass maintenance that happens out here: a kick ass brushcutter, which sees a lot of action; a number of Austrian scythes; a little push cylinder mower thing, that really doesn’t cut it; oh, and the tractor of course.

Yellow lawnmower that thinks it's a Testarossa

But today is for the new lawnmower. It’s one of those purchases we didn’t really want to make, but just had to. So we thought about how much we wanted to spend and then pretty much doubled it to get something half decent that is going to do the job (and take all the rough treatment we will no doubt give it). And we got lucky, thanks to the fab people at the local, independent lawnmower shop: http://www.ieuanevanssonlimitedllandeilo.co.uk/ They really did do us a good deal and we got a much higher spec machine than we thought we’d get for the money. It’s a Stiga 47s, galvanised and self propelled, with the ability to collect cuttings or mulch the grass up finely and put it back into the ground. All good. It’s got a nice quiet engine too, that’s supposed to be nice and efficent. So as far as petrol lawnmowers go, it looks like it scores reasonably on the environmentally friendly front. I suppose the way you use them is important in considering the overall impact of the machine though…

And so…

The mower is primarily for mowing the paths between the vegetable beds. In the Summer it needs doing every week. With the little push thing that we had, it was just impossible because the grass would soon be too long for it and usually it would be wet from the rain, which further hindered our ability to cut it. I was resorting to using the brush cutter, which really isn’t the tool for the job. Cutting the grass paths in the vegetable garden has the huge benefit of providing a fantastic mulching material for round the plants. When spread on the beds, the grass cuttings suppress weeds and retain moisture; a thoroughly fantastic use of a ‘waste’ product. If and when we get to the point of covering all the beds with clippings, we can compost them, or just use the mower’s mulching function and return them to the grass to provide a bit of fertiliser.

We’ll also use the mower round the yurt to provide us with a bit of a lawn to roll around on and for friends to camp on etc. It’s also going to come in really handy down in tipi hollow and the shrubbery. I’m sure we’re (actually, most likely I’m) going to get a lot of use out of it.

Oh and the lawnmower is yellow and looks like a Ferrari Testarossa. Ridiculous or what? Why?