Today was lawn-mowing day.
Lately I have made small inroads into "greening" my parents' lifestyle. Why not also take a stab at their grass-butchering routine? On paper, it's a very good idea; conventional gas mowers are loud, smelly, inefficient beasts, and our particular mower's blades are so dull that it tends to bend grass rather than cut. Oldschool push-style mowers are quiet, emissions-free, and would give me a workout pushing them around. I could even listen to some tunes while I mowed. Just me and the outdoors, and no combustion engine to get in the way. To me, there should really be no question as to which option is better. So it couldn't hurt to dust off one of their two (two!) push mowers just to see what it would be like, right?
It was a backbreaking, sweaty, horribly misguided, and short-lived experiment. At the beginning the thing cut with aplomb, tossing clippings behind it in a satisfying arc. I smiled when it happened, but I hadn't yet realized that I was cutting very thin grass near the driveway . Then I got into the thick of things, and it got hairy very quickly. On anything but the absolute sparsest of weeds, the thing would choke up and become a very heavy plow, digging itself into the lawn where it should have been cutting. By the time I'd "mowed" about two meters worth of lawn space, I had stopped probably five times to see if there was a buildup of grass or a stick that might be obstructing the spinning blades. No such luck; this thing just sucked. Adjusting the cut-height seemed like a good idea, but did nothing noticeably useful. So I gave up, cursing and stumbling as I dragged the hunk of useless metal back to the garage to get the gas mower.
I can see why people tend to deride the old push mower. What a terrible experience! I think that there's probably a reason that these relics were left to gather dust in the garage, beyond the simple answer that gas mowers are slightly easier. Perhaps they are broken or very dull. Perhaps some magical new technological wonderfulness has been poured into the newfangled ones (which look exactly the same) that virtually all of the neighbors use. Certainly, this lawn isn't going to get a carbon-neutral mowing with our current options.
Chalk it up as a work in progress.