Permies Poll: How do you mow your lawn?

I have a gasoline powered self propelled walk behind mower for my property. It is too small for anything bigger and has a lot of terrain/corners to get around. I'm hoping to switch to electric once this mower starts to quit.

"As infrequently as the biting insects will let me get away with" is my most accurate answer. Wish I had no lawn, but alas I have a 1/2 acre that requires a riding mower if I don't want mowing to be an all-day activity. We are pleased that clovers, dandelion, and other low-lying wildflowers have so successfully colonized the property, and we are taking steps toward reducing lawn area further. I think I use about 5-7 gallons of gas on mowing, per year. The mower doubles as a leaf mulcher in the fall. It's not too bad I guess.

Timothy Norton wrote:I have a gasoline powered self propelled walk behind mower for my property. It is too small for anything bigger and has a lot of terrain/corners to get around. I'm hoping to switch to electric once this mower starts to quit.

Why?

Why not switch to bufflalograss?

Anne Miller wrote:Why?

Why not switch to bufflalograss?

Actually, I did not consider this! I thought you meant another plant. I'm going to do some seed shopping!

For a long time, a large, well-mowed lawn indicated that the landowner was extremely wealthy because they must have a lot of sheep.

I choose to live my life by this standard.

I drive a Cub Cadet lt42e electric mower. I mow with it 2-3 times per year. Way more often that that, I use it to tow a yard cart full of tools/firewood/produce/water/granddaughter/etc around the property. And I use a DeWalt electric string trimmer where the mower can't get. My "lawn" gets smaller every year.

Used to use a hand powered rotary push mower, but too much grass and too hard to get to.  I hand weeded front courtyard, 8 hours per week and was backbreaking and grueling. After a close encounter with two copperhead snakes one day who struck at my face while I was down on my knees weeding,  did a knee jerk reaction.  Cemented the entire area and never regretted it.  Now I have a nice place to pot up plants on a table without worries, and for friends to stop by and visit or just sit outside drinking herbal tea.   Anything else in grass got planted into herb gardens/beds, interspersed with large flat stepping stones.   Grass is for grazing animals, why have it if you don’t have it where they can access it?  

The last few years, it's been mostly goats, but, even with 29+ acres, we also don't really have a 'lawn'. This year, we will also be adding sheep to the mowing staff, and I found an old a sythe to use for the places where we can't safely move the critters.

Gasoline powered self propelled walk behind mower for me also. Primarily this is to create a zone for wildfire control (and a buffer against rodents also).

Not a putting green, though -- it's as long as possible, and I'm letting the dutch/white clover creep in and bloom and seed, and the local hares spend a lot of time grazing on my lawn.

In future, a lot of the "back 40" may see a 3-pt. hitch mower on the back of my little tractor. This will be a few times a year, for fire control. I currently do it with a mondo Stihl weed whacker that does a pretty good drop/chop if my timing is right (no weeds set seeds). Even then, I notice a lot of good pollinator action happening in between.

r ranson wrote:For a long time, a large, well-mowed lawn indicated that the landowner was extremely wealthy because they must have a lot of sheep.

I never considered the sheep angle! The way I learned it, a large well-mowed lawn simply indicated that the landowner was extremely wealthy because they had so much land they could allow a lot of it to be completely unproductive, or negatively productive. This was a form of conspicuous consumption popular among European aristocrats, and Thomas Jefferson imported it with him when he returned from his stint as French diplomat, making sure the grounds at Monticello were surrounded by lawn. Americans then copied it from him and thus it became part of the Ideal American House. (Admittedly, I don't remember where exactly I learned this; I never read a book about it.)

We have many acres of grass on our farm. And I'd have more if I could. I mow three times a day, including the neighbors next door and the land across the road. I use a really big zero turn gas mower, that has two very large baggers on it. ~By old time standards, we would have "many sheep".

(Actually, Richfield is called Richfield because we have such, ... rich fields. From the 1830's to the Civil War, some of the richest folks in Ohio lived in Richfield because they could have thousands of head of sheep here. In the 1840's John Brown (The Great Abolitionist) lived here. He was the best most knowledgeable sheep man in the world. His knowledge was passed down to our family. We are still raising sheep to this day.)

Every single bit of grass I mow goes to our milk cows and other farm animals. Everything gets rotated, so what I mow is getting some height to it. The cows eat it like candy. And ignore their pastures. So the pastures rest all Summer, and provide good grass come Fall. And we use less hay come Fall/Winter than other folks who have run out of pasture. Plus, our cows produce more milk than do just grain fed and/or pastured cows.

+1. I like the idea of a lawn as a working grassland and habitat, not a polo pitch for the rich and foolish. Well managed, it can be quite productive. In future, I can imagine rabbit tractors on the spots where I see wild hares today.

I use a string trimmer when I must mow.
Mostly I have no lawn, just grass as weeds in my garden paths.
If it's not feeding me, my animals or my plants,I don't want one.

If anyone in the house was really into outdoor leisure, I would be down with it, but they are definitely not, and certainly not up for the up keep involved.

My “yard” is mostly native pasture that is in very poor condition despite my 3year long efforts at this point. So I mow about 1.5acre with a rider on the highest setting (6”ish?) usually 3-4 times per year. I let it get to about 12+ before it gets cut. I dabbled with just letting it go wild but too many snakes also thought that was a great idea. No go for my daughter.

I mow around my berry patches which is also in the yard with an electric push mower. It’s kinda weak but it’s only a small area so I buy the cheapest one they had.

Field got bushhogged this year because there was no animals due to injury. I mowed after seed set to spread that good and overseeded clover which isn’t looking like it’s going to do much of anything. But normally no field mowing just wanted it short for the seeding.

We live in an apartment and there is lawn for people to share.  It gets mowed, in the warmer months, every Mon. and its always earlier in the morning than I'd like .  I haven't actually seen what they use to do it, its loud and sensory overload and I hide inside and avoid it.  Or if I'm lucky I'm already out and about and I miss it.  Probably the only time in my life I think being out early is good.

I'm honestly pleasantly surprised with the amount of animal lawn maintenance responses. That is really neat.

Yeah, but I hoped to see more scythes!

I used to use our horses to mow the lawn and weed eat with the goats.  However I had to stop doing that when I put in fruit trees and berry vines/bushes.  The goats destroy them. Also the horses were knocking over the trash can with the rabbit pellets even with the lid bungeed down so they could eat it. Yard is fenced in over an ace.  I do still run a small chicken tractor in the yard, a 5 foot by 10 foot long.  I also have the goats and chickens fenced out of my garden!

About four or five years ago, my husband bought me a battery powered Stanley xd self propelled lawnmower and wheel barrow also battery powered.  I love them both, but it was taking for ever to mow the lawn. So two years ago, we use the tax refund that mostly generated by our ranch/farm to purchase a Green Works riding lawn mower with bagger that is battery powered. I can now get the lawn mowed in about 45 minutes instead of several days. I use the lawn clippings to mulch the garden, feed the rabbits, goats, and pigs and sometimes chickens.  Last summer i used the bagger to make some test bags of small scale silage. The test silage was a great success and I am planning on making a lot more silage this spring, summer and fall.  

We run about 35 head of goats on rotational 7 rotational grazing pastures. I follow the goats with a steer or two and my 3 remaining horses.  I raised about 700 roosters in chicken tractors in one rotational grazing pasture. Used the Green Works battery powered riding lawnmower to pull a cart with feed and water out to the chicken tractors and I used it to move the chicken tractors.  I can mow really tall grass with the Green Works riding lawnmower. I was surprised that it would go through grass a foot tall.  Can't use the bagger when you are doing that though.  I had to mow the pasture in front of the chicken tractors so I could move them. I would mow several days worth in front of the chicken tractors so the bugs and stuff would come back before I moved the chicken tractor.  I will be mowing part of the pasture to make extra silage too.  I also use the battery powered mower with cart to haul the roosters up to the house in cages so customers can buy them. I sell live birds. I don't sell processed birds.

I also used the Green Works battery powered riding mower to mow along some fence line so I would not have to do as my with my battery powered weed eaters. it worked better than expected so I am going to do more of that this year.

The small scale silage is hopefully going to help cut down the amount of hay I purchase.  I plan on feeding it to goats, horses, rabbits and pigs, and maybe chickens.  I just empty the bagger into a barrel or plastic bag and get the air out and seal it up.  I try to mow when it is dry in the afternoon and that seems to be the right water content.  I am able to reuse the plastic bags as long as they don't have holes in them. I hate plastic, but I don't have enough barrels for storage yet.  

I use a brush cutter blade on my battery powered weed eater to clear fence line so my high tensile electric fence will stay charged enough to keep goats in. I can take down 3/4 inch diameter saplings and rose bushes with the battery powered weed eater with the brush cutter blade.   I have also switched to using electric battery powered chainsaws for those times when i have trees come down on the fence.  

I still use the Stanley XD pushmower and wheelbarrow.  They both still work great. I use the battery powered wheel barrow more and I don't want to ever go back to having a push a wheel barrow or pull a cart by hand.

I use a rotary push mower. we don’t have much “lawn” really just enough mowable grass/clover/weeds for a picnic table, clothesline, and birdbath. We’ve reduced bit by bit, but it’s nice to have enough space to have people over for a cookout.

Somehow when I gave a thumbs up to the reel push mower, I accidentally hit the thumbs down!
Sorry about that, I'm actually an avid fan of walk behind manual reel mowers and own probably half a dozen of them. For small areas of grass that need to be kept short, not exactly a lawn, push mowers can't be beat.
Besides,  not that long ago that was all there was for mowing your lawn, and somehow people struggled through it.🤔
Pretty much zero environmental impact and you get some exercise and fresh air at the same time.
👍👍👍 There, now you have my thumbs up for the manual reel mowers!

I've been mowing my lawn with a scythe for years now.  I do get out the "solar powered" electric string trimmer to get into some sections just too tight to effectively get with my fairly large scythe.

I got in too late for the poll, apparently, but I have an tiny electric push mower to do the paths between garden beds, fruit trees, and such.  It is 14inches wide, and just barely squishes through some spots.  Not a lot of lawn!  And that is mostly escaped mint, wild strawberries, weeds, and clover.  

Erika Bailey wrote:I got in too late for the poll

Oops! I intend for this to be an open ended poll so each user can cast their vote when they come across the thread. I intend for Permie Polls to be fun but also potentially informative about trends. I'll get it corrected so you can cast an apple if you haven't yet!

None of the above. I don’t really have a lawn, but I have a lot of grass to cut, some of which is lawn-like once cut. I use gas weed-whacker with string, gas weed-whacker/brush cutter with blade, and/or a machete, depending on conditions.

Multiple selections were not allowed so I selected scythe because I do use it and not many do but my wife uses the riding gas mower on the large lawn between the drive and the berries but it is left as a prairie until the short grass in it sets seed before it is mowed to keep that consistent.   The gas trimmer is used with a blade where it is tough to cut with the scythe and with string against concrete.  Bottom line by selective mowing, mowing for neatness has been minimized but I do a lot of mowing with the three tools for harvesting the resource.

Anne Miller wrote:

Timothy Norton wrote:I have a gasoline powered self propelled walk behind mower for my property. It is too small for anything bigger and has a lot of terrain/corners to get around. I'm hoping to switch to electric once this mower starts to quit.

Why?

Why not switch to bufflalograss?

Why not?  Because once it starts to go to seed it is miserable pointy scratchy stuff to be around.  Given the number of people who like it for lawn I assume there must be different varieties because the stuff my mother got and grew, I hated with a passion.  It was almost as bad as thistle to walk thru once it went to seed.  It was fine till it started to seed.  And I never see the nasty seed part in any of the pictures.  So I will say at the very least be careful what variety.

I have  under 200 Sq ft of lawn, that I can easy mow 4-6 times yearly with my push mower.

It seems I have no apples to vote with, but I had one thumb, but oh well lol I still love using it for 5 minutes!

I used a push reel mower for about 10 years while I lived in rentals with small lawns. Now I have my own property with a much bigger yard. I have used an electric push mower for the past 3 years, but I have reduced the lawn area so much that I'm going back to my push reel this year. I just did some spot mowing in a few places this morning and made sure to mow around all the dead nettle that's starting to flower. Don't want to get rid of all those free greens! I'm hoping dead nettle and other wild edibles will eventually take over. I noticed chickweed for the first time this year. Wahoo!

I am jealous! My acre will be covered in snow for a couple more months!

C. Letellier wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:Why not switch to bufflalograss?

Why not?  Because once it starts to go to seed it is miserable pointy scratchy stuff to be around.  Given the number of people who like it for lawn I assume there must be different varieties because the stuff my mother got and grew, I hated with a passion.  It was almost as bad as thistle to walk thru once it went to seed.  It was fine till it started to seed.  And I never see the nasty seed part in any of the pictures.  So I will say at the very least be careful what variety.

Probably what your mother grew was not the buffalograss that I was referring to:

https://permies.com/t/93789/Love-Affair-Buffalograss-Buchloe-dactyloides

https://www.thespruce.com/buffalo-grass-7105718

I can't find the scientific name though there is another grass with the same name or a similar name that is not desireable, sorry that I cannot find that.

Jim Fry wrote:I mow three times a day   . . . Every single bit of grass I mow goes to our milk cows and other farm animals

Interesting!
I have never heard of this, not being a farmer.  
-- How do you prevent all that cut grass from almost instantly fermenting in warm weather?  Do the cows eat it before it overheats?
-- You mow 3x / day?  Could you expand on that!  Wow!

You can actually make small scale silage with your lawn clippings. i did test bags of silage last fall and they turned out great after fermenting in the plastic bag for 6 or 8 weeks, they goats loved it. The lawn mower silage smelled great to me too.  Our lawn is fertilized by a chicken tractor and it has a lot of clover in it also some plantain, and a few other edible weeds and of course grass.  This spring, I am going to make a lot of silage with my lawn mower. I mowed late in the day on a dry day.  I double bagged the silage in plastic  garbage bags and you can reuse the bags if they don't get holes in them. You can also use five gallon plastic buckets with a tight fitting lid or barrels.   I will be cutting down on the amount of hay I need to feed to my goats, steers and horses.  I think my chickens will like the silage in the winter and I have read that you can feed it to rabbits which I might experiment with too.

I dumped the clippings out of the bagger directly into a plastic garbage bag and double bagged it. Then I pressed as much air as possible out of the bags by kneeling on them. I tied the top shut on the inner bag as tightly as possible. And then I tied the outer bag.  There was a small disc of mold right under the the bag closure that came out in one piece.  It was about 8 to 10 inches in diameter and about 1.5 inches thick.  I tossed that to compost. The rest of the silage was great. The test bag where I used partially dried clippings had a lot more mold about three inches thick all over the top of the bag and down the sides. I didn't feed that as it wasn't as nice smelling.

If you didn't know fermented feed (silage) is often fed to cattle. So a little fermentation of the grass clippings won't hurt the cow.  I used to feed fresh grass clippings to my horse when I was a kid. My horse loved it and she never had  problem with it.

I feed fresh mown grass clippings to my rabbits, goats and pigs. They eat it fast enough that it doesn't ferment.

I leave it long so it will store much energy and set seed. When that's dry i mow it. I mow some pathways strategically. I've learned to love the scythe too in the veggie garden on grassy bits or to clear weeds i don't want a lot of.

Around the house & orchard I use my trim mover a 60" zero turn. In the open area diesel tractor with either 7ft or 15ft cut.

No, I did NOT know, until speaking with a cattle farmer yesterday, that fermented grass(hay in his case) was used. . . He explained how in the winter here in Minnesota he feeds 2 to 1 ratio of dry / "wet" bales to his cows.  The wet round bales were wrapped in plastic so they did not dry over the winter months.
My concern, mold, you address by hand picking it out.  Somehow that does not seem very time / cost effective for a big operation so I figure you only are keeping a couple cows vs this guy's 150.  Also, your hand bagging, double bagging . . . just too . . . MUCH!

In my rural neighborhood, a lawn is just mixture of all kinds of native species that endure repetitive cutting.  If we don't mow, trees will take over: red cedar, mulberry, oak, redbud, hornbeam, just a name a few. Young saplings are easier to kill with the mower. Otherwise, if we delay mowing for certain period of time, we will have to rent a bush hog instead.

We mow with critters in the backyard when it's tender, but the front is more tricky because we live in a neighborhood. We generally mow that with an electric mower and bag the clippings, then lay clippings in a thin layer on the driveway to quickly dry (before it ferments) and make hay. After a few hours it's usually good to go into a storage tub for later when fresh food is scarce.

Even if I used an apple, that gives me two votes which doesn't count the ways....

For the small (and shrinking) lawn on our city property, we use a reel mower.  In the country (2-3 acres of grass), we have a Kubota B2620 diesel tractor with 5' mid-mount mower, a Cub Cadet XT2  (if I remember correctly...seems to me it's a 42" cut) lawn tractor, and I putter with the scythe.  It's been a struggle over the years to keep up in the country...weather plays into whether or not we can cut with the machines (i.e. when it's too wet they tear up the sod / ground).  Since we live at the city property, we can't look after animals at the acreage at this point.  It got incredibly frustrating to go out to do some stuff, but wind up only getting the grass cut.  Last year, to a degree, I let the grass go.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the lawn grasses, and even the quackgrass, seem to be height-limited and I decided to live with that.  Ideally, I get at the patches of quackgrass with the scythe before they go to seed.  That way I get some mulch from it.  Even with the mowers, the taller quackgrass will bunch up creating piles...I can then move it around relatively easily to use some as mulch or add to the compost pile.

The Kubota is bigger and faster, so it does the bulk of the work.  The Cub Cadet is more manoeuvrable, so it does the area around the house and around some of the obstacles.

I do want to reduce what we mow.  I'd love to replace the grass in the city - as we have a dog, I don't want to turn it all into garden, but it would be nice to have a low-growing perennial that is hardy enough for our part of the world that will take some traffic / abuse.  In the country, some of the patches are being seeded to native tall-grass prairie plants.  As those establish, my hope is that in part, they'll be a buffer to prevent overspray from the industrial agriculture on two sides of us.  

I'll have to take a look at the buffalograss option to see if it may work for us.

Brian E Schreiber wrote:No, I did NOT know, until speaking with a cattle farmer yesterday, that fermented grass(hay in his case) was used. . . He explained how in the winter here in Minnesota he feeds 2 to 1 ratio of dry / "wet" bales to his cows.  The wet round bales were wrapped in plastic so they did not dry over the winter months.
My concern, mold, you address by hand picking it out.  Somehow that does not seem very time / cost effective for a big operation so I figure you only are keeping a couple cows vs this guy's 150.  Also, your hand bagging, double bagging . . . just too . . . MUCH!

I run 35 head or so of adult goats. We have been kidding since the end of November so we have added another 30 kids with more to come. We have 3 pigs, 3 horses, a steer, chickens, and rabbits. I will probably bring in two or three calves here pretty soon.  Round bales of hay first cut are anywhere from 45 to 75 dollars right now.  I go through about 45 round bales each winter. If I can cut that down by feeding my own small scale silage, it will help our small farm make a little money or a little more money.  Last year I also raised over 700 roosters which I sold live. The roosters like getting extra grass clippings even when I have them in chicken tractors. It also cuts down on how much feed they eat.  I figure a good grass clover silage probably is coming in at 15 to 18 percent protein.

Technically bales that are wrapped are called haylage.  Silage is chopped up forage with sometimes chopped up green corn stalks (they have corn that is specifically planted for making silage) and sometimes they add some grain to the mix. Then they ensile it in either the stand up silage towers (they don't use those much anymore) or they pack it down into bunker silage that they drive tractors over to pack it down and sometimes they tarp those and they now have tube silage where they use a chopper to force the silage into the tube and pack it so their isn't much air in there.  

For my test bags, the disc of mold on the one bag ( the fresh mown in the afternoon grass) was small, in once piece and I could grab it and it came out and stayed in one piece.  I had a good 45 pounds or so for silage left for a few minutes or work. So that was no trouble at all to remove and that is the silage I am going to make this spring from fresh mown lawn with no drying done to it.  The bagging is simple.  I am sorry if I didn't describe it good enough. I put a plastic bag over the end of the lawn bagger from the lawn mower. I dump the bagger bag over and hold onto the plastic bag and let the bagger contents dump into the plastic garbage bag.  Then I push the air out and fasten it shut. It wasn't that hard the first time and it was easier the second time.  If I can get enough barrels to hold the silage I will move to using barrels but the barrels have to be air tight and have clamp on lids and I would need a lot of them.  So until I have enough extra barrels, plastic bags it is.