When you mow, how far do you go?

Obviously, this depends on many factors. The larger your mower’s deck, the fewer passes mowing your yard will require, and so the shorter the linear distance you will have to travel.  If you mulch instead of gather, you don’t have to go back and forth to your compost pile.  Depending on how much overlap between mowing passes you do, you’ll have to do a greater or lesser number of passes. And while you might live on, say, one acre, your house, barn, shed, swing set, and so on will all take up space, reducing your distance, but perhaps causing additional or slower passes to get around obstacles. Yadda yadda yadda.

Despite the mathematically imperfect nature of our mowing conundrum, let’s still consider some idealized math. Again, the goal is to determine how many linear feet you mow, and then try to guess at how much time is required by various pieces of equipment, give or take.

1 acre = 4,840 square yards = 6,272,640 square inches

Based on this, here’s a little chart showing the linear miles and some estimated times for various sizes of mower blades, on a one-acre yard. (Hopefully, your yard and mower aren't just an inch wide.) 

How does this compare with reality? My 34-inch mulching walk-behind mower takes me about 1.5 hours to mow about an acre. It’s more than the above prediction (what I’d expect to be a bit more time than 0.92, or say an hour) because of some overlapping of passes, some precision work to mow around my apple trees, some required stopping and moving of lawn furniture/toys/sticks/snakes, etc., perhaps some time spent refueling, occasional stops to chat with passers by, and such. So, figure, real life adds about 50% or so more time to this “ideal” mathematical estimate.

Although endowed with a larger deck, when I mow with my riding mower (48-inch deck), it takes me over two hours, even though the ideal math says it should take under half an hour. Why? It must be the distance to the compost pile. This machine doesn't mulch; it has a grass catcher, and its grass chute clogs a lot. So, after some reflection, it seems that from a pure mowing-time standpoint, it was a mistake to buy this machine, so many years ago, though it has been helpful for carting things around. Basically, instead of an hour and a half of cardio exercise, I was doing two or so hours of sitting on my arse, using more gas than necessary. However, if the grass is too high, using the mulching blades results in grass clumps everywhere, which are inevitably eaten by the dog and then barfed into the house. So, using the mulching mower requires more frequent mowing. Nothing is a panacea.

Live and learn. It’s nice to know that I now walk about three miles when I mow the lawn with my new Gravely WAW 34 walk-behind mower. That’s a significant bit of exercise. I really like this machine and am a bit surprised that it’s become my preferred tool and approach to mowing, compared to my Husqvarna riding mower (I won’t dignify it by using the marketing term “garden tractor”), which after three major engine repairs in under 400 hours of use, plus the above reality vs. math reflections, I am growing to loathe.

Meanwhile, my three alpacas are helping out by grazing the back acre, though they are not particularly thorough, leaving burdock, thistle, and so on for me to figure out another solution. Neither of my machines is up to the treacherous task of mowing back there, so I usually rent a tractor with a brush hog a couple times per year to clean that up. Next time, I’ll have to time it, and see how it measures up to my above mathematical fantasy.

One of these days, when my ship comes in, I'd love to add a proper tractor to the fleet. It’s a little tough to justify it mathematically ($300 per day to rent, needed about three days per year, vs. $10,000+ to buy), but everyone says that once you have a tractor, you find a million uses for it. A little tractor with a bucket is about the most fun toy I can imagine.

Someday….