Lawn Mowers Old & New

I used to have quite a small lawn, all of it easily reached from the house. My lawn mower was electric, powered from the mains by a long cable, and this was not only convenient, as there was no need to keep checking the level in my fuel can, but it was also clean. There were no exhaust fumes, no spills, and no tank to run dry at the far end of the garden just five minutes before I’d finished the weekly cut.

Then we moved to a different house. The garden is an unusual shape, there are long stretches of grass that reach far away from the house, and my old electric mower would only reach the far gate with the help of two extension cables. And so, here comes the combustion engine! Now to be fair, I like my Honda Izy mower, and I’m not planning to dispose of it any time soon. However, I do acknowledge that it might not be the most environmentally neutral machine around, and I know that many people feel quite strongly about the atmospheric clean-up agenda.

A Draper Cordless 24V Rotary Lawn Mower in use

So what are the choices for those of us who want to move quickly to a cleaner option? Well, firstly, it is important to remember that electric mowers are not completely clean, so let’s not get too purist about this. The lawn mower engine may not be putting out fumes in your garden, but atmospheric emissions were produced in the course of its manufacture, and a power station somewhere pumps out its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it generates your electricity, even if it is miles away from where you’re using it.

So what about a manual mower? There’s quite a move back to these nowadays. In addition to their environmental credentials they use up human energy and can contribute to losing some of that undesirable flab. If this is too physically demanding, then electric mowers are the next best for cleanness, but don’t forget the problem of the trailing cables.

This is where modern battery technology comes in. There is now a wide variety of cordless rechargeable electric lawn mowers. The Draper model above has a 24v sealed lead-acid battery, whilst the Bosch machine here has a lithium battery.

Whatever the type of battery, they’re all quieter than petrol-driven mowers. (That might have been helpful last week when I had to stop mowing because a wedding was taking place in the church next door and my lawnmower engine noise was interfering with the happy couple’s special day). They don’t put out fumes, and there’s no liquid refuelling to be done. All you have to do to “refuel” is plug it into the mains when you’ve finished.

Of course there are different sizes, both physical size in terms of the width of cut and also battery capacity, and this last point is important. If you’re buying a cordless lawnmower go for a model slightly larger than what you expect to need. Remember that if your battery runs down before you’ve finished the lawn you can’t just pour a bit more fuel into the tank. Recharging is a longer process than that. So when choosing a cordless electric lawn mower do take careful note of the battery specification, what area of lawn it is recommended for, and how many minutes it will run between recharges.

In earlier posts I’ve mention lawn mower racing. I’d never heard of it until recently, but when mentioning it to other people have often been surprised to find that they’re already quite familiar with the sport.

Today, though, I’ve got an extension of that for you. It’s a video game, Lawnmower Racing Mania 2007, and even if you don’t have access to a nice powerful riding mower on which to chase around a race track you’ll be able to experience some of the thrill on the screen.

Another thought occurs to me. You moms and dads who’re sick and tired of your kids spending hours on the murder and mayhem of violent computer games, why not get them into the mayhem of the race track instead with Lawnmower Racing Mania 2007.

Just one word of warning, though. You might end up buying a mighty mower when they want to move on from the simulation to the real thing!

[A final point. Check it out to be certain when you order, but I think you'll find that this video game can only be sold within the 48 contiguous states of the United States. I hope you live in the right place.]

More later,

- David -

Before the invention of the lawn mower only the rich could afford large lawns. A farmer could, of course, keep grass down to a reasonable length by grazing his animals on it, but the way of getting a really neat appearance was to have a troop of garden staff armed with scythes and shears.

Then in 1830 Edwin Budding, an Englishman from Stroud in Gloucestershire, had a bright idea. He was in a textile factory watching a roller-blade machine smoothing the surface of a fabric when the thought struck him. Why not combine a scythe blade with a wheel? He experimented and eventually came up with an arrangement of several blades mounted between two wheels. As the machine moved forward the wheels turned and the blades sliced through the grass. From these beginnings have emerged the great variety of grass-cutting technologies of the present day.

Click on the book pic or below
for details at Amazon.com
American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn

Initially, of course, the mowers were pushed or pulled by hand - and for a century it was hard work. Some people attached mowers to harnesses and had their ponies pull them, but someone still had to walk behind and controlling the animal was not always easy! Today, of course, there’s a move back to manual push lawn mowers as people try to go “back to nature” and reduce hydrocarbon emissions

At the time of writing this article there is apparently on display in a Chicago exhibition something described as the “missing link” in lawn mower evolution. It consists of a tricycle with a rotary grass cutter built in between the rear wheels. Whether something like that existed in the past seems doubtful, but one has to ask why. After all, in the years before electric and liquid fueled mowers its inventor could have made a small (or not-so-small) fortune. Is this the way forward for a pollution-conscious era?

Click on the book pic or below
for details at Amazon.com
American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn

In the unconscious absence of the tricycle mower, however, something had to be done to fit grass cutting into the age of labour-saving devices. Very shortly after applying for his patent, Edwin Budding went into partnership with another engineer and started to manufacture mowers. He also sold licenses for other companies to manufacture similar products and one of these companies was Ransomes of Ipswich in the east of England. Ransomes started making lawn mowers in 1832 and the company still exists. It was bought in 1998 by Textron of the USA, who then put it together with the Jacobsen brand to create Ransomes Jacobsen.

Returning to more than a century ago, for some years steam power was used to pull mowers but it was always cumbersome, and then in 1902 Ransomes introduced the world’s first petrol driven lawn mower. This British company did not rest on its laurels but continued with its programme of innovation. It was doing many imaginative things with electrical power in fields such as the trolley-bus and the battery-powered truck, and then in 1926 brought out the first electric lawn mower powered from a mains supply.

Companies such as Atco and Qualcast flourished during the 1920s and there was much experimentation with different combinations of features. The rotary blade cutter, with its horizontal cutting action, was developed. Larger lawn areas called for machines on which the user could sit and drive, ao the riding lawn mower came into being - although the original developers of these machines could surely not have imagined that there would eventually develop a sport of lawn mower racing with speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour! As lighter engines and plastic components became available the technology moved on further. Flymo introduced and popularised the hover mower in the 1960s, making life much easier for the owner of a small lawn.

And so we move on. The mulching mower, machines for working on steep embankments, machines designed for high-grade twenty-first century golf courses, tennis courts, bowling greens, sports fields, and much more. Electrical technologies have moved on apace over recent decades so that now rechargeable batteries are available to power cordless lawn mowers capable of covering large amounts of ground between recharges. And then we mustn’t forget what surely must be the ultimate in labour-saving lawn-care, the robotic lawn mower which allows its owner to sit in a deck chair sipping a drink while the faithful machine runs around the lawn unsupervised and when finished returns to its docking station to recharge for next time.

A subject that I’ve been seeing and hearing in gardening circles more frequently during recent months is atmospheric pollution caused by lawn mowers. It is quite an important issue because most petroleum-powered mowers emit considerable amounts of environmentally harmful exhaust gases.

I’ve heard it said that a typical lawn cut can generate as much “greenhouse gas” as a drive of several hundred miles. Whether or not that is scientifically validated I don’t know, and I’m not going to get obsessive about this, but surely it makes sense to reduce our emissions as much as possible.

Unfortunately there is a lot of scientifically ignorant nonsense talked about this subject, and it is important not to go crazy about it. For example I’ve heard carbon dioxide described as dangerous poison. Actually it is not poisonous to animals, including humans, and after the two main gases (nitrogen and oxygen) the second most common minor component of our atmosphere is CO2. We’d be in a mess if it wasn’t there. It is the basic source of carbon for the growth of green plants, which need to “breath” it in just as we humans need oxygen. The problem is not carbon dioxide in itself; it is a question of how much and where. In other words, maintaining the balance of nature.

So what can we lawn cutters do? I suppose at the extreme we could revert to manual mowers, and for small areas that could well be the best solution as it would give many of us some of the exercise that we’ve been denying to our bodies for far too long. There may, of course, be another side to this argument given that the human body emits carbon dioxide with every breath. I wonder to what extent this is increased when we burn up chemical fuels in our muscles during intensive exercise such as mowing a large lawn. After all, even our bodies generate exhaust fumes. Whether anyone has ever looked at this scientifically I don’t know, but I feel instinctively that the balance of benefit must be with the manual mower and the physical exercise.

Having said that, manual lawn mowers are not a realistic option for everyone, especially where there is a large area of grass to be cut. So how about electric mowers? For small areas, where a power supply is conveniently near to hand, these may be powered by electric cable but advances in rechargeable battery technology have made cordless electric mowers a genuine alternative to those with liquid fueled engines, even for quite large areas.

The use of electricity is, of course, not carbon neutral. The power generation company will have pumped CO2 into the atmosphere long before the electrons circulate in your machine. However, this will be much less than from a typical fuel-inefficient lawn mower engine. Technologies are developing fast, and new options will no doubt be with us before long. Meanwhile we can all play our small parts in protecting the balance of our atmosphere.

- David Murray -

This story is a couple of years old, but I just came across it today. It tells of the CEO of a quality lawn mower manufacturer in the USA who said “No!” to Walmart because he felt that to have his mowers heavily promoted by the giant store would pull down their quality image.

Of course, the arguments were more nuanced than that. There was the impact that it would have on relationships with his network of independent dealers. There was the constant pressure from Walmart for reduced cost (and reduced quality) experienced in the past couple of years while just 20% of his output had been sold to them. He was not going to take the risk of exposing his company to further down-market pressures, so he walked away from what most would have seen as a major business opportunity.

It’s a fascinating story. The make? … “Snapper” lawn mowers. You can read the full story at FastCompany.com.

Happy mowing. Oh, and is your mower of such quality that you’re likely to be able to hand it down as an heirloom, still in working order after a generation of use?

- David -

Which is the correct form? Lawn mower as two separate words? Or lawnmower as a single combined word?

What does it matter? Why bother? Well, apart from a strange interest in the development of words I find it important to understand details such as this in the development of a web site. After all, if I get it badly wrong very few people will ever find my pages. Or is that not true?

Am I talking about correctness in the English language, or am I talking about common practice? And so to the dictionary. The biggest dictionary in our house is one published some years ago by the Reader’s Digest. Surely, they’ll have got it right! Reader’s Digest says, “Lawn mower”.

Then I remembered that a friend of mine has a full multi-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. What can be more authoritative than that? I pick up the phone. “Brian, how should I spell lawnmower; one word or two?” “That’s a strange question for a Sunday afternoon,” he says, but faithfully goes away to look it up. “Neither,” comes back the answer, “It’s hyphenated.” So now we have three alternatives: lawn mower, lawn-mower, and lawnmower.

Hmm. But for the purposes of a web site I need to know not only how it “should” be spelled, but how people are likely to enter it into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo!. How to find out? Ah, yes! Google Trends is the way forward. Let’s enter lawn mower and lawnmower into a comparative keyword history query and see what we get.

The answer is fascinating. In Ireland the single word predominates. In the United States, Canada and Australia the two word form prevails. In the United Kingdom they’re neck and neck. Interestingly, the OED’s hyphenated form gets a big zero everywhere.

So what does all this mean for my web site and blog? If I use the single word the search engines are likely to send me mostly European visitors; if I use the two word form, mostly North Americans. … Answer? Whatever the “official” spelling (if there really is such a thing), use them both.

When I started recently to prepare the content for some new sections of our gardening web site I was more than a little surprised to come across the term “racing lawn mower”.

Now I realise that many parents of teenage children would be delighted at the thought of their recalcitrant offspring rushing and racing to cut the grass. That, however, was not the meaning of the news item I had found. Lawn mower racing, it seems, is quite the rage in some circles today.

Even some famous figures in big-time motor racing have been bitten by the bug of charging around at breakneck speed on a riding lawnmower. Sir Stirling Moss, the former World Champion racing driver, has apparently been one. The British Lawn Mower Racing Association proudly announces on its web site that this legendary Formula 1 driver won both their British Grand Prix and their 12-Hour race. In fact he won the Grand Prix in two successive years in the 1970s.

From small beginnings in a Southern English village in the early-70s the sport has spread around the globe - although an American town in Indiana claims that its races have a longer pedigree - since 1963. There is a United States Lawn Mower Racing Association, and an equivalent in Australia. There’s even a two-day World Championship meeting.

So what is a racing lawn mower? What’s the difference between this and go-cart racing? Maybe not so much. After all, not too long ago the best way of getting an engine for a go-cart was to strip one out of a old lawnmower. Lawnmowers, though, are off-road vehicles and don’t need a solid surface; and the lawn mower racing purists are insistent that there must be a clear difference. The mower must have had working grass cutters (although they’re removed for racing), and still have a mower chassis and a grass collection box. It must originally have been manufactured as a functioning mower.

At the most basic end of the spectrum the “driver” runs behind the mower. At the super-sophisticated end miniature tractors with 250 cc engines charge along at 50 mph. Those less inclined to expose themselves to danger can now experience some of the buzz through the medium of a lawn mower racing video game.

By way of introduction, this blog is a partner both to my gardening web site and to its accompanying blog, which like the site also carries the name, Gardening-Notes.

Incidentally, I’ve always thought of lawnmower as a single word. I now find that “correct” form is to use the two words separately: lawn mower. Given that people might search at Google, Yahoo! and other places using either form I’ll mostly use the double barreled name but occasionally will include the single word.

Why have a separate blog for lawn mowers? Well, I guess it’s about a combination of guilt and enthusiasm. I’ll confess. I’ve recently been kicking my lawnmower when the engine wouldn’t start. Actually it turned out to have been all my own fault; I’d tipped some petrol into the tank without realising that it had 2-stroke oil in it, and the spark plug got coated with carbon.

Anyway, I started to feel that I should be more kind and complimentary to my trusty machine - feeling guilty about maltreating it the other day - and suddenly became enthused with the idea of a lawnmowers blog.

So here it is! I guess that this will be a bit more chatty than the formal style of the main gardening-notes.com web site - and I’m going to follow this with a short piece I wrote earlier today after discovering a new sport. At least, it’s new to me.