Plus mowing a lawn is meditative
Copying another comment I made earlier
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
I'm not much of a workaholic, I don't really like going outside or getting my hands dirty...
But mowing the lawn is nice. It's like doing a giant coloring page with a big thick marker.
The past couple of years I've lived in a place with no lawn to mow and I miss it.
Niceness of lawn mowing is very climate dependent. Around 70 degrees I don’t mind it. Different story when it’s 98.
Unenjoyable, and my electric motor’s batteries die twice as fast in the heat, so I have to do it two days in a row instead of being able to get it over with. But I don’t hate it quite enough to blow hundreds of dollars on extra batteries or to pay someone else to do it.
I once had an electric lawnmower with a cord on it. Swaps one inconvenience for another. You don't have to recharge it, but you have to keep the cord out of the way.
I've had both. I'd rather have battery operated, especially if you have a big yard. Having an extra backup battery is a good idea as well.
Absolutely agree. I could easily afford to hire a lawn crew to cut my lawn, but I enjoy doing it every weekend or two for similar reasons. I have a little under half an acre to mow, but I still enjoy doing it manually with a push mower.
Gets me outside and moving, accomplishes something tangible, can catch up on a podcast or two or just get lost in my thoughts, often leads to fixing other odds and ends around the house I've put off.
I always thought this song was about mowing the lawn during tough times, but apparently not:
https://genius.com/The-all-american-rejects-move-along-lyric...
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There is something beautiful about getting hands dirty with actual dirt/earth. Its such a REAL feeling.
A friend of a friend got sick of tech work. Now she bills out at $70-120/hr doing garden and landscaping work. Not her crew, just her. Solo work on nice houses. Not lawn-mowing, landscaping. Very dirty every day. If I had a job I'd be jealous.
I bought a real stinker of place to renovate & of course the yard is completely overgrown.
Every wo/man and their dog is telling me to knock it down, have a bobcat to clear the yard and start fresh.
I enjoy the work of clearing a yard by hand, and slowly cleaning the place up.
Gardening is my stress reliever for this reason.
Though going to war with pests is… less stress relieving sometimes.
I would agree with you if I wasn't so allergic to grass.
Funny enough the parts of the lawn that are still grass are what force me to go out and mow it before the seed heads start spewing pollen. Though if you’re allergic to the hay too (curiously, I’m not) you have my sincere sympathies. That said, even if I didn’t have bad grass pollen allergies, I’d still have to keep the grass from getting too big because deer/dog ticks will start to host there, especially with all the critters we have running around.
Most of my yard (not tiny, but not big either) is clover/legumes now, and I only mow it once it’s seeded and matured, to encourage a new flush of flowers for the bees/flies/beetles and such. As a bonus the clover tends to push out the catsear too.
I’m also fond of my mint patch, and all the little mint moths fluttering about it.
Fun fact: people are not "allergic" to pollen, they are having a legitimate immune reaction to pollen deploying enzymes that cut up proteins in your respiratory tract. This is because pollen is "designed" to chop up similar proteins when it lands on a flower.
> Plus mowing a lawn is meditative
Not when its >100F and >30%RH and a bright sun in the sky.
That’s what evenings are for…
The 100F time is already the late afternoon/early evening. Am I supposed to mow in the dark when its 98F? Or should I wait until 1 AM to mow? I'm sure my neighbors will love it.
At least with the extreme heat the grass doesn't grow quite as fast.
There's always sunrise