Lawn mowing always feels like one of those tasks you dread more than most. Even with a small lawn in your yard, you approach it like scaling Everest. There are just so many things that bug you when mowing the lawn – but that could be because you’re either using the wrong tools or doing things plain wrong.
As it happens, many of your common lawn mowing issues can be solved in a jiffy, and here’s a list of those problems, complete with how to handle them:
The lawn mower is too heavy
A big factor that drives your hatred of mowing the lawn stems from how physically demanding the job is. You only have a small patch of grass to deal with, and yet the effort of pushing the lawn mower is ridiculously great. That’s because a lot of older mowers are absurdly heavy as they have gas engines.
With a typical gas-powered lawn mower, the engine means it can weigh between 55 and 100 pounds. That’s heavy – especially when you have to push it around your garden, and maybe up an incline. The solution here is staring you right in the face: get an electric lawn mower instead. Electric mowers will weigh up to 60 pounds at most, meaning even the heaviest are as light as some of the lightest gas-powered ones.
If you get yourself a cordless one, then it’s even easier to move around, as you don’t have to worry about any wires. It’ll demand less physical effort and make the task of mowing your lawn a lot easier. You’re also way less likely to put your back out, which you may have done in the past, hence your…lack of enjoyment towards lawn mowing.
There are always bare patches after mowing
You mow the grass, turn around to admire your work, and see patches everywhere. They look quite bare and muddy, ruining the way your lawn looks. Instead of a green field of beauty, it looks like the top of a balding man’s head.
This is called scalping, and it happens when you cut the grass way, way too short. You go low enough to the point where your mower basically just rips the grass from the root, leaving the exposed soil beneath.
You’re inclined to do this because your brain goes “ah, if I cut it as short as possible, it’ll take longer to regrow, and I won’t need to mow the lawn again for a couple of months”. While the logic is admirable, cutting the lawn too short is a problem. Experts always recommend you only cut about a third of the grass’s current height off.
This stops you from “scalping” the lawn because you don’t cut too close to the roots. Yes, you’ll need to hop out there a bit more often, but hopefully many of the tips in this post make lawn mowing less stressful, so it doesn’t feel like a massive chore anymore.
You constantly see an uneven cut
You’ve mowed the lawn but realized a glaring problem: the grass seems uneven in certain areas. It’s weird because you absolutely went around the whole lawn cutting each piece. It’s also annoying because now you have to go back over the long parts to trim them down so your lawn doesn’t look silly and uneven.
Two things could’ve happened in this situation:
- Your mower’s blades are dull, so they cut inconsistently
- You accidentally raised or lowered the mower’s cutting height at certain points
Solve this common lawn mowing problem by sharpening your blades before every use. Give them a quick once-over so you know they’re ready to slice through every blade of grass consistently.
Similarly, make sure you set your mower’s cutting height and avoid messing around with it. You should always mow in straight lines as this is more efficient, so at the end of each line, double-check that the height is still the same. If you accidentally flick it up, flick it back down again before making your next pass.
Your mower keeps stopping & clumps of grass litter the area
An extremely common problem with an extremely common cause: you’re mowing wet grass.
Yes, you want to feel productive and it’s sunny outside on a glorious Saturday morning. It looks like the perfect excuse to get this chore out of the way so you can enjoy the rest of the weekend. The only issue is that the grass might be wet from morning dew – or it could’ve rained for days before and this is your first sunny moment in a while.
Wet grass clumps up and clogs your blades, which is why the mower keeps stopping as a safety mechanism. It’s also why you’ve got clumps of grass all over your lawn because your mower spits them out. Solve this in one simple swoop: only cut dry grass.
It takes forever
Why does it always take forever to mow the lawn? It only takes a couple of minutes to walk up and down your lawn, so why on earth are you out there for an hour with your lawn mower?
You’re probably not mowing that efficiently; as mentioned earlier, mow in straight lines up and down your lawn. This ensures you never miss a patch and creates a nice, even cut the whole way through. It also speeds things up quite dramatically.
Alternatively, it could take forever because of your choice of mower. Again, as noted earlier, heavy mowers are a problem because they slow you down. Opt for a much lighter one that’s a breeze for you to move. You could even go one step further and consider a robot lawn mower – they’ll handle some of the regular cuts for you, so you don’t have to do anything.
Start addressing your most common lawn mowing problems, and you slowly start to peel back the layers and realize that this isn’t the worst task in the world. What used to take you an hour – and leave you quite unsatisfied – now takes half the time and gives you a lawn to be proud of.
