Joe_the_Gardener

Re-design

No apology necessary Carly! (By the way, she's a teacher, so spends half the weekend on school work, and most of her kids are pre-verbal.) Good luck with the campaign, I'm not against it, but the practicalities and the economy may be. Necessity is usually the mother of invention, so we'll see how things go - if we live long enough.

on their way to garden near you!

Muddy Paws,

Perhaps you could suggest that the school starts a walking bus. It's great socially and even one day a week makes a big difference.

Re-design

I think it's a great ambition, Carly, but it would demand a considerable change of direction from the manufacturers, and they would need to take the public with them if they were not to be left with a warehouse full of unwanted mowers, however well-engineered. 

I bought my daughter an electric mower for about £50 from B&Q to do her little squares of lawn front and back, and I doubt if a push one would be cheaper. And I can cut her privet hedge to perfection in about five minutes with the machine.

She is of a generation that prefers an electric gadget, and she prefers zumba to gardening. I was brought up push-mowing with a Qualcast, but I'm not sure there's any way back.

Trees and shrubs for peat?

Is this area literally a bog, i.e. water table permanently at surface? 

Lawn Trouble

I'd agree with Geoff.

How short you cut the grass is a separate issue. A lot of damage is caused by scalping lawns; just raise the mower by one notch at first and see the difference, then try another notch.

Talkback: Garden birds in the snow

What kinds of hedges do your House Sparrows prefer? My observations suggest that beech is particularly popular, followed by other semi-dense deciduous, then hawthorn, with any sort of evergreen a long way down the popularity list.

National DIY chains remove bug killer containing neonicotinoids from sale

Thanks for the useful list of products, Tim.

Re-design

Luke,

The questionnaire doesn't really suit my circumstances, because the only lawns that I mow are other people's, and I use their mowers. It's likely that there are other professional gardeners on this board who might wish to answer, with the benefit of their wider experiences with different machines in different circumstances and with different priorities. Interested?

Re-design

Hypercharleyfarley,

I've only ever used one Hayter and it was a bit of a pig. The 'skirt' round the blade was too low and the grass box was very low-slung, so these two things meant it scraped or jammed on any ground that was even slightly uneven. And it was a bit difficult to get the grass box in and out compared with other mowers. (By the way, I wouldn't recommend your elastic loop round the dead man's handle to keep the engine running. I see people doing it and pray that they never have an accident.) There's obviously a need there for a better design of electric starter.

I've never had any trouble fuelling a mower; surely, provided you use the nozzle pipe that is supplied with the petrol container, there's no problem?

I don't know how keen manufacturers would be to put a side blade on a mower - I can see there might be some nasty accidents. I use edging shears, which seems perfectly easy.

Rollers are probably a personal preference. Unless they actually drive the machine, there will always be conflict between the setting height of the roller and that of the driving wheel. Driving off the edge of the lawn occasionally is an occupational hazard and I find I just have to take extra care. A wider front wheel would have to be so wide that it would flatten a lot of grass in front of the blade and it would become less effective going round a curved lawn edge.

Was your Atco a cylinder or a rotary? I'll bet it had an engine with really good torque and weighed a fair bit. The other problem with rollers, which can weigh a heck of a lot, is that they can compress the ground over time, depending on the soil type.

Clogging is quite a problem and it would need a lot wind tunnel experiments to design the optimum profile for the chute. I suspect that most of the better mowers have already come to somewhere near to the optimum by an iterative process. Cleaning after every mow obviously helps a lot, but I'm not sure that using, say, Teflon for the surfaces would help, because it would be easily damaged. Otherwise, if I'm mowing wet grass and the mower keeps clogging, I just resort to inaudible swearing.

Re-design

bunnysgarden,

I have to mow in the wet or I wouldn't get round all the jobs, and two of my lawns are almost permanently wet, so if I left the cut material the lawn would be impossible to deal with after a month.

Hedging shears

Malvern