Americans love their lawns. The average amount of time people spend on their lawns every week is four hours. In a year, that is the equivalent of eight days or 208 hours. Having a lawn is important to at least 83% of people in the United States and 90% of them think it needs to be well maintained. Real estate agents say that a nice front lawn increases a home’s curb appeal as well. When it comes to lawn maintenance, there are things that can be done to get a better result from lawn mowers.
7 Tips to a Better Mowing Job:
- Pick your approach. You can either mow your lawn and then trim the edges or you can trim the edges and them mow the lawn. If you mow and then trim, you will spend less time trimming. If you trim and then mow, the clippings from the trimming will be mulched back into the yard and that is a good thing. Just pick your approach so that, either way, you do not have to spend a lot of time going back and forth from one tool to the other.
- Be careful not too cut the grass too short. This is also referred to as “scalping.” If you cut your grass too short, you will end up with brown patches of dirt where your lawn is uneven or you have root systems. During the warm months of the year, keep the grass cut at about one to three inches. During the cooler months of the year, do not go below between two and a half to three and a half inches.
- Cut your grass, not the flowers. The border around your lawn, the first lap taken around the yard by lawn mowers is called the collar. This is typically down around the outside border of the yard. Lawn mowers need a wide collar to be able to turn around safely without knocking out any flower beds that you have around the perimeter of the yard.
- Take your time. You are mowing your lawn, not driving in the Indie 500. If you go too fast when the grass is dry, the results of your mow job will be uneven and the clippings you leave behind will be poorly mulched. If the grass is wet when you speed around the lawn, you will have a hard time cutting it at all. Wet grass is hard to cut when mowers are going too fast.
- Leave the clippings. When you leave the clippings where they fall, they will replenish the lawn with nutrients. This will give your lawn much needed nitrogen. Leaving the clippings to nourish the lawn will make it a lot healthier and look a lot better. This is a cheap and easy way to add to your fertilization routine. Plus, your back will thank you for not bagging all the clippings.
- Keep your eyes straight ahead. Many people look down at the mower or the ground right in front of them. If you keep your gaze ahead of you by about ten feet, you will end up walking in more of a straight line than if you look directly down at the ground.
- Do two jobs at once! Save time by doing your edging and trimming at the same time. You can use a string-trimmer to cut a clean edge around the edges of your lawn. That means you will not have to use an edger in a separate step. You do this by holding your trimmer head at a vertical angle. The edge it cuts will be deep. Then flip it horizontally to trim.
Some people are under the impression that having a lush, green lawn is a decadence that comes at the expense of the environment. While in some areas, that are experiencing a drought, constant watering is an issue, in many others, a nice lawn is actually good for the planet. Enough oxygen is released from a lawn that is 50 feet by 50 feet to sustain a family of four. Moreover, that same sized lawn will consume carbon dioxide, peroxyacetyl nitrate, hydrogen fluoride and ozone. So your pretty lawn is actually fighting global warming!
