Lawn Mowing Techniques

Mowing your lawn is probably carried out more often than any other job in the garden. Correct lawn mowing will not only help keep the look of your garden but will also help to keep the health of your lawn.

As the season begins in spring your lawn mowing will begin. These initial cuts should be completed on a relatively high cut setting. As the season continues you can gradually lower the cut to your required height. For normal lawns the cut height may vary between 15mm up to 35mm and for the finest lawns between 6mm up to 15mm.

The frequency of your cutting will depend largely on the weather. In normal condition mowing twice a week will help keep your lawn in the best of conditions. However, in really dry spells only once a week will be required. It can also be a good idea to leave the clippings uncollected in these dry spells. This will help retain the moisture within the lawn.

The best stripes are created with cylinder mowers where the lawn is cut in one direction only. The heavier the roller the more defined a stripe will be achieved. The best way to then achieve stripes up and down the garden is to first cut around the borders to create a turning area. Once this has been completed you start at one side of the lawn and cut up and down the lawn overlapping the previous strip each time.

It is also important to raise the level of the cut slightly again to help retain the moisture in the lawn. The removal of clippings is generally important. To leave clippings on the lawn will reduce aeration of the grass, encourages worms and can cause disease. This is particularly so in damp conditions.

Shredding garden leaves is, of course the most obvious. Gardeners love the vacuum function for making mulch and compost out of grass and leaves. Used this way, blower-vacs can reduce 16 bags of loosely packed leaves to one mulched blower bag.

Blower vacs are particularly useful for clearing out leaves and debris when space is restricted, such as behind garden sheds or other diffcult to reach areas of the garden. With a special extension attachment, blower vacs are also handy for "sweeping" out gutters, garages, and carports, not to mention cleaning driveways or decks before sealing them. They're also used to sweep pool decks and even dry off cars and their engines after a wash.

The blower vac two-stroke engines are powerful for their weight and inexpensive to manufacture, but these advantages are also disadvantages. They are inherently dirtier and noisier garden tools. Blower vac Manufacturers such as Echo utilize unique sound attenuation technology for the PB-46LN. Others have designed larger mufflers, rubber-isolated engine mounts, and spring-mounted handles. Some, like Husqvarna with its E-Tech engine, have developed low-smoke oil and redesigned the combustion chamber and muffler in order to reduce emissions. Both Honda and Ryobi have designed smaller, quieter, and less polluting four-stroke engines that will soon serve to power garden blower-vacs.

Recently electric blower vacs have started to appear. In response to concerns over the noise of petrol-powered blower-vacs, corded electric models are now more powerful than ever, some of them even surpassing their petrol-powered brethren, and with less weight. The biggest drawback to these garden blower vac units is that you're limited to 100 feet from the plug socket, or the motor can be damaged. A few cordless battery-powered blower-only models are also available, but they tend to be heavy and have limited run times.

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