...you know, the ones without gas or electricity or batteries. Do you have one? What kind is it? Do you like it? Would you recommend it?
We're thinking of ditching our slightly broken (my fault) hand-me-down electric lawn mower in favour of a quiet, environmentally responsible reel mower. It sounds like a good idea, but God knows I've had enough of those end in disaster...
Thus I thought it would behoove me to ask the question, "what do you think of your reel mower?"
I can't get my mind off of Spring today...
9 comments:
Depends on your grass. We used to like ours but we re-sodded last year. We had to get an electric one after that because the push one tore up our lawn. We keep offering people our push one but no one will take it :(
If you want it it's yours, but I highly recommend an elctric (or gas).
Hi. I'm a long time lurker. Hope it's ok to post here.
My husband likes our manual mower (I think we got it from Sears) but we have mostly bermuda grass and weeds.
It is good, environmentally friendly and it gives you a workout.
Of course, we started using a gardening service a year ago so ours doesn't get much use these days. I'd give you ours if you lived closer ;).
We had a reel mower when we had our townhouse. It worked well since there wasn't much to mow.
The only complaint I had was that if the grass got really tall/thick, or a piece of mulch got stuck in the reel, it would get locked up.
But it was easy to use and quiet. We got ours at Sears, too.
We've used a manual push mower exclusively ever since we moved into this house (11 years ago). If you mow regularly (once a week) and you don't have extensive acreage, I believe it's by far the best way to go. Environmentally friendly, good exercise -- that being said, it really doesn't take much more effort than a power mower, providing that the grass isn't too tall.
Plus, it's practically noiseless, which means you can mow at 7:00 am if you're so inclined... I couldn't recommend it more highly!
I'm with Bronwyn...we have one, have had it for several years. We have a pretty teeny yard, which helps. But if you let the grass get tall it's...a bit more of a workout! but then you can reward yourself with lemonade and the satisfaction of a job well and environmentally kindly done!
I used one for a few years and it worked pretty well. It gives you quite a workout.
Ours works well for our small front lawn. Only complain? It isn't very wide, so you have to go round and round and round. Get one with as wide of blades as possible (ours is probably 12-14 inches, too small...). Also, it kind of sucks when we let the lawn get too long, because it doesn't mulch the clippings like the gas mower does (and I like to leave the clippings to reduce water consumption in the summer). Finally, it is tricky to set ours to a different height (I like to set it to about 3 inches in the summer, again for water retention - I halfheartedly attempt to xeriscape with a bit of lawn).
Does that help??? :)
We got one for cheap at a yard sale -- a very very old one. I wanted to be more environmentally friendly. It was useless though, couldn't do anything with it if the grass was more than like 2 inches high. Seeing as i am of the opinion that the stuff doesn't need to be touched until it is going to seed (and dh usually refuses to cut it at all no matter HOW tall it is) -- it didn't, uh, work with our lifestyle? LOL we are somewhat lawn-impaired people.
We have been using the ASM380 for 3 years and love it. It is light-weight, quiet, easy to maneuver and sharp looking. The downsides are the price (US$370 plus duty) and battery life. The battery life is only an issue if it normally takes more than 40 minutes to cut. Also it works best on shorter grass, rather than not cut for weeks at a time grass.
Check out this web site: http://cleanairgardening.com/reelmowers.html
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