lawn mower adventures

I have been using a Scotts reel-type mower since we moved into this house.

Pro

• Quiet! Can mow late or early without bothering anyone. Can listen to music on headphones at low levels
• retro fun, simple, "good enough"
  
• relatively cheap to buy and maintain
• clean scissor-like snip, rather than blade whacking
  
• similar to exercise!
  
• the "green" angle is a welcome side effect.

Con

1. twigs will stop forward progress right now
2. too-tall stalks (like 8" weeds) will usually bend under the reel rather than be snipped by it. Gotta bend over and pull them or break them off short.
3. blade alignment takes some practice to learn

It's still my go-to mower. But I inherited a "needs help" electric lawnmower off Freecycle. The donor thought there was a problem with the motor as batts had been recently replaced.

I put it on a 24V BatteryMINDer smart charger I already owned to charge other 24v devices. The mower ran for about 2 mins. Hmmm.

I suspect a bad batt or at least uneven charging so I put each battery individually on a 12v BatteryTender which I got a garage sale in Heights for $5. Each battery charged seperately. The mower ran about 3 mins.

When I put the mower back on the BatteryMINDer this time it charged then indicated sulfation and began the desulfation cycle. This cyle ran about 2 days, reported ok again. While the batts got massaged I pulled the brushes and filed them a bit. Then the mower ran for the entire time required to mow the front yard. (I had already done the back yard with the reel). I don't know if it was due to desulfation, brushes, both, or neither. I'm betting on desulfation.

Put it back on the BatteryMINDer and it's been desulfating for 3 days. Hopefully the desulfation will help the batts limp along enough to do at least the front or back yard. I'd be ok with that.

eco-friendly lawn = lawsuit

Master Composter Rob and I were talking about the uselessness and wastefulness of lawns the other day. Here's a family that did something about it and got their @sses sued.

Orange officials sue couple who removed their lawn
City codes require that live landscaping cover 40% of the yard. Quan and Angelina Ha say their water use has dropped 80% since they replaced the grass with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants.
...
Meanwhile, the couple said they had reduced their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009.

composting, version 3

I spent some time this morning talking with local Richardson resident and master composter Rob.

I've been learning/experimenting with compost for a while but sometimes talking it out with a teacher really helps gel one's thinking.

Lessons I learned from Rob, and took to heart while watching him work his own compost piles:

1. A practical, simple approach to composting will suffice for most people.
2. Circular bins are great. They can blend into your backyard -- the mesh is almost invisible and the leaves and other materials are, by definition, a natural color. The bins can be unhooked quickly and relocated; this gives you plenty of room to "completely deconstruct" the pile and rebuild the parts that need more time (see below).
3. Sifting can help seperate out the "finished" parts of the compost from the unfinished. Rob has MacGyvered up a sifting mechanism that lets the finer, velvety compost fall through for use while retaining the coarser materials for reconstruction of the pile.
4. Multiple piles are useful and time is your friend. Multiple bins can help this process along, but Rob demonstrated that a working compost pile can stand on its own after it has taken shape. You can remove the circular bin to start a new pile.

So I came home and decided to make a few test bins. They wouldn't be as good as Rob's bins but these are another step in my own understanding of how compost works. The image above is one of the three 3' diameter bins I made that came out ok. I have one tucked away beside the house; it holds leaves I swept up from the curb. There's one stored behind the shed and one that's going to get used next as soon as the ugly duckling 4' bin gets full.

I wasn't trying to make a 4' bin; I was trying to make a 3' bin from 9.5' of material. But it was my first one and a series of mistakes meant I cut out 12' instead of 9.5'. Oh well. I didn't want to cut the material down and have an unusable scrap, plus I figured this would be a good way to experiment with size. It's holding together and isn't wobbly. The wire is 16ga and fairly heavy.

Edgy

Edged the lawn over the past couple of days, spending a little time each morning controlling the st augustine before it got too warm.

I have tried two methods:

1. weedeater - physically less demanding, but difficult to keep good control of the edge. The line autofeeds on this one, which makes me a bit crazy. Loud, so unsuitable for early AM and late PM.
   
2. a manual edger - excellent edge control and quiet to use, other than the cursing and panting. Physically demanding. The most intense arm workout that I've had in a year or so.