Gardening is fun and should be kept that way.
Gone are the days when chores like preparing the soil, mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge, cutting off the whiskers around the edges of lawns, trees, and fences, cutting brush, or moving heavy loads have to be hard work.
Now you can breeze through mowing several acres of lawn and hop off a riding mower feeling just as full of pep as when you started—thanks to man-made horsepower.
Don’t Settle For Any Machine
And you don’t have to settle for just any machine. Whatever your problem, there’s a machine for it and a size to fit your purse and garden.
If you select a tractor, you can get anywhere from 11/2 to 9 or 10 horsepower; one to walk behind or one you can ride on.
And with it, you can pull or push lawn mowers, plows, rotary tillers, cultivators, fertilizer spreaders, carts, and lawn and driveway sweepers.
You can cut trees or saw fireplace wood, mow brush and weeds, move snow, grade soil, spray pesticides or paint, pump water and even generate electricity—without the usual quota of blisters.
Get Rotary or Reel Type Mowers
You don’t have to be content with a hand mower and cut up to only about 17″ inches at a time. Now you can get rotary or reel-type mowers from 17″ inches to 30″ and even 36″ inches in width and even more if you go into a gang (or group) mower.
You can use sickle bar mowers for rough ground, coarse grass, and even small brush—as well as finished lawns. And if you live in the South, you can easily cut St. Augustine grass, tough as baling wire, or the lushest of Bermuda lawns.
If you’ve reached the age where the doctor says “No” to pulling a cord for engine starting, you can choose an electric mower or a gasoline-powered one equipped with a self-starter.
These can be operated with a battery or be hooked into your regular household circuit. There’s no end to the many conveniences to be found on the market.
Don’t Rake Up Your Clippings
And you don’t have to rake up your clippings either. You can scoot with a hand-or gasoline-powered lawn sweeper or drag one around behind your mower.
You can also get several mowers that pick up their clippings, leaves, and other debris, depositing them in a detachable catcher.
Now to get down to specific examples—a 60′ by a 100-foot lawn that takes two hours to cut by hand, counting time out for mopping the forehead, etc., can be mowed comfortably with a 30-inch riding mower in about 30 minutes, or a saving of 1 ½ hours and a great mile of pushing.
Or, to look at it another way:
- A 16-inch hand mower requires 43 passes at a 50 x 100-foot strip
- A 19-inch power mower, 38
- A 21-inch, only 32
- A 30- to 36-inch one, proportionately less
Trimming Whiskers Around The Edge
For trimming the whiskers around the edge, it’s possible not only to eliminate the need for getting down on your hands and knees but, with a long-handled electric grass trimmer, you can cut your time down from about 2 hours to 5 or 10 minutes. In addition, you can cut at least 250′ feet in that time.
Trimming the hedge, a perennial chore in most gardeners’ minds, can likewise be reduced to a pleasant pastime with electric hedge shears.
Trimming a 100-foot hedge—top and both sides—a four-hour job by hand, can readily be reduced to 30 minutes and, again, without blisters.
Using A Tiller
Or have you ever spayed your garden over by hand and timed yourself? I tried it once.
It took ¾ of an hour to do 100 square feet, and I worked right along at a good steady clip. Of course, I could have done it in less time if I had been willing to settle for a half-done job instead of well-pulverized soil. A tiller can do it in 5 minutes.
Leaf Raking
As for leaf raking, I have cut my time down to ¼ using a hand-pushed sweeper. Gasoline-powered ones are even quicker. And this included carting away and dumping the leaves on the compost pile, which I didn’t include in the hand-raked job.
41340 by EDWIN F. STEFFEK