The Pain of Lawnmowing

Lawnmowing is a pain in the neck for anyone who has or at least thinks he's got better things to do. One of my neighbours doesn't, and he cannot resist for more than two weeks; then he just has to get his lawnmower out and then eagerly turn it on. Do I really see withdrawal symptoms in the man's features and behaviour, or am I making this up against my best intentions?

(Microsoft Media)

As far as I'm concerned, I hate lawnmowing. And, no, I don't generally fight windmills instead. Sure, there are people who mow lawns professionally, but then, they are gainfully employed doing this, and apart from deriving at least part of their income from doing so, their bills contain a tax component, which is also why they have to title it "tax invoice", and along with it civilisation is being fostered. Who was it that said "by paying my tax bills I buy civilisation"? Or something along those lines.

But if you mow your own lawn for whatever reason, even against your will, don't you feel it always comes as a pain in the neck, whether you do it once every two weeks or once a month, or wait even longer than that? Isn't it always in the way and a bit of a nuisance? Have you ever tried allowing the grass to grow for eight weeks without interruption? And then you find your electric lawnmower is having a hard time eating its way through it; and it keeps humming to a halt.

Last summer I bought a pushmower thinking that maybe that will allow me to give myself a workout and make lawnmowing more useful. I began racing across the lawn with that muscle-powered mower before me. I even let the wind take care of the grass clippings, simply because I had found out that putting a catcher holder and bag underneath the handles turned out to be of little avail.

(Microsoft Media)

When I race across the lawn which isn't particularly level the grass-catching contraption skips and hops and most of the clippings end up on the lawn again anyway. Would I therefore have to do the mowing more slowly? Possibly, but that would turn the mowing into a nuisance again, making it slower and not much of a workout anymore. This would either make the push mowing counterproductive or the clip catching. Either way, that's a bit of a dilemma.

A fuel-powered mower is loud and stinks, and I hate having to muck around with such a mower almost as much as mowing the lawn in the first place. This, therefore, meant clearly having to stick with the electric mower. It skips far less than the pushmower, which prevents the grass clippings from being lost along the way, and it is a lot quieter than the fuel-powered mower, but apart from not giving you much of a workout, a mower with an electric motor is considerably weaker than one with a fuel-driven engine.

(Microsoft Media)

Apart from the mowing proper, there are all those weeds, and there's no end in sight as far as they are concerned. If you don't rip them out every now and then, they take over the entire lawn bed. Here's a good opportunity to thank the inventor of the marvellous lawn-weed leverage-rocker pivot-bridge extractor or whatever that wonderful tool is called, that you fork weeds out with by their roots; weed-extractor fork might be a suitable name, it swivels on a kind of rocker blade which makes it look like a little seesaw with the fork at one end and a handle at the other. It must have been patented at some stage, and it certainly goes by a name that can be expected to more or less speak for itself.

In order to get rid of the weeds, simply mowing the lawn won't help, though, even if you cut it all down to a millimetre above the soil. Those weeds will grow back faster than the grass, and perhaps even faster than you can say "I think the lawn needs mowing again".

(Microsoft Media)

If you therefore look at your lawn and can't convince yourself to mow it, at least grab one of those extractors and pull out the weeds. This will, as an added bonus, give you the feeling of having done something about that lawn instead of just putting off the inevitable, time and again, until you grow such a painfully bad conscience that you wish you didn't have a lawn at all, unless you can live with a wild meadow beside your house - it sounds worth giving it a try, though - or decide to do something for civilisation and have a lawn-mowing contractor do it for you.