Permies Poll: How do you mow your lawn?

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 learned this from my farmer a couple years ago. Same ratio, personal dairy. 4a Quebec

We have a battery operating push mower as I get sick from gasoline fumes. Plus, fuel mowers have the dirtiest engines possible so that's not for me.
Presently another 10% of the former lawn are covered with cardboard, awaiting a brilliant idea as to what I can plant there (under three 3 years old fruit trees).
One part is meant to be turning into a wildflower area but I fear it's a buffet for pigeons and mice. At least some yellow rattle comes through. Next year I'll put in buckwheat to try and suppress the couch grass.
Another area is now shrubs and herbs.
The higher the growth, the more life returns. Above and in the ground.

This is a very complicated question … for me.  Depending upon what I had for breakfast, the phase of the moon, and if my cat saw its shadow, I might use scissors, gas trimmer, push mower, Dr. Brush cutter, tractor, or riding mower.

This year I have been using my lawn for feed for livestock.  Hay has been getting exceptionally pricey, so my yard represents $$$ saved. But, it is getting out of control, so I plan to break out one of the larger machines and attack it.  Of course, I will put the cuttings to good use.

I plan to go back to hand baling my own hay later in the summer. The last time I checked hay was just shy of $10 a bale.   Putting up 100 bales would represent a significant savings.

I currently use a 40 volt battery push mower. I have a LOT of area to mow primarily for a fire buffer but also for ease of getting around: the land is former pasture so it is covered with grasses that will grow to 3-5 feet tall and native volunteers (various thistle, buttercup, etc).  I am trying to turn one of my battery mowers into more of a field mower by using larger tires so I can cut at 5-8 inches height but am having trouble assembling various parts necessary to use the larger wheels/tires (different size hubs and the tires run on mower housing).

The elk do help quite a bit but they are not here all the time, so not really reliable for keeping things down as needed. I am not here all the time either so do not have the luxury of having 4 footed mowers that I keep, darn it!

Hello! I live in a rental, with a nice yard. The owner loves her cookie cutter yard. But as nature needs our cooperation I let the grass and “weeds” grow. Today they re knee high. I dont have a scythe, just an electric mower. In Belgium we have may not mow month, and except for the stubborn one many seem to like it. Only thing is, end of may, the flowers are not yet in seed, so to cut them off would be ridiculous. The grasses are high, many varieties and swing beautifully in the winds.Someone advised me to cut the high grasses as they would inhibit the natural evolution of a flower field?
Anybody any advice? When to mow, how much what and when?
What would happen if you just let nature do its thing? That’s what I m inclined to do but my landlord will not be happy.
Her main concern was that the cookie cutter lawn would be well maintained and not a wilderness.
VERY UNFORTUNATELY

Tractor with rough cut mower for large portions of the back pasture
Zero-Turn for the areas I can't maneuver with the tractor
Push string mower for along the tree lines and hills
Hand-held string trimmer for anything I still can't reach

I'm considering switching to thermite and kerosene for all areas.

I don't have a lawn per say. I do use a gas powered brush mower from DR to mow my easement road and my septic drain field. I also use an electric trimmer to get things the mower can't.

But then I live on 40 acres in a rural area rather than suburban or urban.

P.S. I have watched a lot of sickle videos on youtube (over 3hrs of them). Unfortunately my land is too rocky and woody for a sickle to work well. Not to mention most of it is very uneven with little to no flat ground.

Until I finally get it all mulched and planted, I have 2+ acres of weedy grasses that have to be mowed, constantly it seems.  I have it down to about 4 big patches my wife can do with a gas riding mower from last century, while I get the edges of the property, and around the house with a gas self propelled walk behind and a string trimmer.

It's been 2 years and so far I have converted about a 1/4 to 1/2 an acre into a potager garden and food forest.  If deer weren't so plentiful, I'd probably be farther along.

gir bot wrote:Last vote in apple poll was on June 4, 2024

Yeah, that was me. And NO, the thumbdown on Gas Riding Mower was not intentional.

Devin Lavign wrote:I don't have a lawn per say. I do use a gas powered brush mower from DR to mow my easement road and my septic drain field. I also use an electric trimmer to get things the mower can't.

But then I live on 40 acres in a rural area rather than suburban or urban.

... Unfortunately my land is too rocky and woody for a sickle to work well. Not to mention most of it is very uneven with little to no flat ground.

Easements: good point.
I am also rural with big rocks and small boulders hidden in my easement.

The half acre of forest alongside the road requires no upkeep, but the adjacent half is a bend in the road with grass and even bigger rocks from a municipal backhoe clearing mountains of snow (I get extra smowfall.)

I was 18v cordless trimming this easement but have gradually been moving it towards wilding like I've been doing elsewhere, especially the septic tile bed, my first permie project, about 9 years ago wheh I discovered permies while trying to find out what I can grow on it other than grass. (Its a Monarch / bee wildflower wilderness).

Along the easement, to respect my neighbor's lawn, I hand pick the dandelion flowers before they seed, and they go in the compost tea shed rain catchment bath.

So I guess you can say I trim what's left literally by hand.

This easement has a row of tall spruce trees -- it's a mixed forest zone. I encourage my neighbor to send all their leaves up against the spruce, rather than bagging them (I'm downwind so that's easy) and I have been slowly working on a small swale along the whole this easement.

Next spring, all along the swale, i will be relocating some rubris odoratus from beside my tile bed, and will continue to fight the battle to eliminate cultivated grass. Every year I have less grass, more acidic mulch, and the municipality stopped cutting it with their tractor about the time they were using a bucket, so i have a chance to wild it, while producing flowers and berries.

The tile bed is also due for a workout: I eliminated more of my remaining lawn, but some grass has seeded in the tile bed (and rubris odoratus has been rooting out the moist soil up against the tile bed but
not in it, surprisingly.)

Need a reason to reduce your lawn? Check out this video

I use an old wheel horse 350 ride on to maintain the part the kids play on and trails, the rest goes wild and is slowly turning into a food forest.

NB no lawn as such, but we mow fire breaks with the ride-on, and use a string trimmer for the hard to get nuisance spots.

Our “lawn” lawn, like the actual bit we’ve designated as backyard for the dogs and the kids to play? Zero-turn mower. We use it for mowing the orchard rows currently as well, but working toward shifting to sheep for that purpose. Hayfield and large miscellaneous areas like along the side of the driveway get done 2x a year with the tractor & haybine. Pasture is cows, but we need more cows for the area we have just to keep things down to manage fire risk a bit better.

We still have our old Honda gas mower, it's one of the gas tools slated to be sold to the guy who buys such things when we get all of them where my partner wants them to be, condition-wise. We don't use it.

We do use an electric walk-behind mower and an unpowered reel mower these days.

A large swathe of our "lawn" is moss -- which I love. STays green with no work from me, ditto staying a managable height. I see moss killer sold in garden centers. Why?

We have less and less "lawn" as time goes by, but the regular mowing of weedy matter around the paths, barns and house is done by the chickens. Once or twice a year, we mow with a tow-behind mower deck to keep blackberries from taking over under the trees. And I have a blade attachment for my string trimmer I use to chop and drop around fences and other areas, or I will use my hori hori knife. I want to add goats at some point, but until then we must do their work and ours.
Scything is nice if you have the right scythe, but the one I have is for a tall, long-limbed person and I am a short lady, so I make do with what I already do have. It would be cool to have a proper scythe, but I would probably rather have goats first!

Now that we have a small yard, ... my goal is to keep a portion of lawn to hopefully have summer outdoor house concerts, but the rest of the yard I'd eventually like to turn into garden.  The landlord told me that, if I move slowly I have options, but not be in too much of a hurry to change things.  So I want to respect her and move slowly on plans.  Once I get a composting system set up then I will probably want to ask the yard person for grass clippings to add, but again starting slow with everything.

I don't see a poll, but will answer anyway.  We -- myself and my handicapped daughter, and my brother and his wife -- have two houses and a couple of old barns on a little over two and a half acres.  Over half of the land is fenced pasture for a few goats, plus my fenced yard, which is close to half an acre, is used to rotate the goats onto fairly often.  My brother takes a brush hog to the actual pasture two or three times a year to knock down any weeds the goats don't want to eat, and he mows my fenced yard with an old riding mower that he was given (in need of repairs) a couple of times a month.  His own yard gets mowed more like once a week, but we try to keep the goats from going there because they'll eat my SIL's ornamentals and the few fruit trees we've planted.  

I'm considering swapping the goats out for hair sheep (the sheep would be a better meat source for us than the little Nigerian Dwarf goats, but more important, the hair sheep I'm considering, St. Croix, are much more parasite resistant than the goats).  I don't think much would change, though, since St. Croix sheep are known for being good browsers like goats.  

Anne Miller wrote:
Why not switch to bufflalograss?

Do you know the Latin name of this grass?  I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what it would be called here.

My half acre was sterile land 8 years ago and its all slope. So I let the grass grow. I found the terracing done by horses 300 years ago so that is all I mow w a 20 hp tractor which also hauls tools to the orchard I planted 6 years ago.
Around my grapes, blueberries, peach tree, raspberries, hazelnut, apricots, plum and apples I leave grass grow to slow the rain surface water running down hill to stay and seep in.
Only mowing the terraces cuts my mowing down to 30 minutes per week and I have to admit its like riding a four wheeler up scarey turns and leaning out to get traction.
My tractor uses 1/5 gallon per week.
I trim with battery trimmers.
My neighbor mows with electric push mower. He thinks he is conserving power but it takes him all day. I love it.

I wish to register a complaint about the poll. I put in a vote for gas-powered mower because that's what we use to mow the south half of our clearing between fenced garden space. Sometimes we use the bagging mower if we want to use clippings for compost (mostly we use it to chop leaves for making leafmold). But my husband now cuts the north half with a scythe, for mulch. With a path through it. Because mowing is a necessity here, because of chiggers, but it's good to have half of it to use for mulch hay--poor quality because it's so full of a variety of weeds, many of which go to seed early, so I get the plants coming up around the mulch, Putting a couple sheets of newspaper under the mulch helps, some. He uses a European scythe.
But once I chose "gas lawnmower" I wasn't allowed another vote.

Tiffaney Dex wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:
Why not switch to bufflalograss?

Do you know the Latin name of this grass?  I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what it would be called here.

Buffalograss, Buchloe dactyloides

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

Mary Cook wrote:I wish to register a complaint about the poll.

I'm sorry Mary! There are a few different ways to setup the polls, this one I am trying my best to capture what technique folks are 'usually' using which allows one 'apple' vote. If you have PIE you get two votes under the 'people's choice' part of the poll.

If you lay male Buffalo sod, it doesn't go to seed. It's more expensive, though.

We replaced our Kentucky Blue Grass lawn with a hybrid from High Country Gardens called Dog Tuff https://www.highcountrygardens.com/product/sustainable-lawns/cynodon-hybrida-dog-tuff. It's pretty, nice to walk on, dog-resilient, drought-tolerant, etc. You don't have to mow it because it grows out not up (it will take over if you don't have a separation between lawn and other parts of the garden), but I prefer keeping it shorter. In the summer, I use a reel mower on it as needed. In the spring, we have a bunch of dry stuff from last year that's not so pretty, so I go through with a scythe to remove it.

My answer was 'What lawn?', because I don't have a lawn, nor a meadow, or anything grassy here. At least not in the front or back yard at home. I have beds/borders with plants (mostly perennial) and there are paved paths.

But I need to say the truth: at the allotment I do have grass paths and I do mow them. There I use an electric grass-trimmer (not with a cord but rechargeable).