Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I suggested a Scythe because it's what we use for the chalet.Once a year, grass are 1 meter tall, the badminton field (4x8meters) is done in about 5 minutes.

Whoa. Got me curious.

https://youtu.be/gsfIHiBB6xE


https://youtu.be/1I4RNenmfFI

very frightening and exciting at the same time!

https://youtu.be/PQVWj_vWJPw

The Scythe is badass, though sharpening may take some extra time.

I used to joke that most of my landscaping work was done to support my own maintenance laziness. It's funny 'cause it's true.

A lot of my best tips have already been covered, but here's my short list:

1) Make flower bed areas around all trees to make it easier to mow. Bonus points for using flexible borders with generous bend radii that the mower can take with no hard corners.
2) Use landscaping cloth in those bed areas to keep out weeds. Cover in year 1 with good mulch.
3) Don't bag leaves in the fall. Instead, mow them into a bag and distribute in the flower beds. Free mulch!
4) Set up an automated watering system. You don't need an expensive in-ground system. Instead, plan out hoses and sprinklers that install above ground and cover the entire yard while staying out of the way. It's cheap and very easy to do and you can even get timers if you like automation.
5) Buy plants appropriate for the area. Focus on perennials that can survive the winter, with preference to hearty plants that don't require much water.

A cheap way to irrigate is to stake down irrigation tubing through your garden and then poke holes in it with a sharpened bicycle spoke. Do it with the water turned on and you will quickly learn where to poke the holes and how to twist the spoke when you pull it out to adjust the spray of water. Add a timer to your system and you can easily keep your plants watered even in the hottest months, with no effort by you.

Cleared more brush in the yard. I used the Honda Strimmer again. We have a garden wall going around two sides of the property. Hedges had grown up against the wall and it was difficult to get between the hedge and the wall to trim the back edge without a ladder. There was a similar problem along one side of the house.

This really slowed down hedge trimming. So I removed many of the bushes. A good number were dead and covered with ivy, morning glory and wisteria. They needed to be removed. Other ones just needed a walkway hollowed out between the wall and the hedge to facilitate fast trimming. Our previous gardener just used a long hedge trimmer and got the front faces of the hedges because he was concerned with relieving me of my money as quickly as possible while keeping the place lovely at 30’.

So I outfitted my trimmer with this blade. The bends allow it to cut in a stabbing motion and in a up and down sweeping motion. You kind of chew into the bush like pac man. The twigs (I cut up to 1” dia) can be vertical or horizontal and it still plows through. In this sense it works better than a circular brush blade. It is tougher than nylon cord. Uses its angular momentum to build up energy. Flywheel effect. It takes a few seconds to spin up but once it gets going it really slashed through thick vegetation. Massive blade kind of like a motorized machete.

Oh yeah and I forgot to mention, it mulches up the cuttings so you can leave them on the ground. Any big cuttings can be mulched in place by just plunging the tool down on the debris. It just disappears.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/295505-0-Unive ... B00L46JVYK

Oddly not readily available over amazon USA. I got a copy from China eBay. $10 shipped.

This thing really makes short work of unwanted brush. Now it will be easier to move quickly around my property with other high powered tools. I had to resist the temptation of turning the entire place into an open meadow to facilitate efficient yard care.

I learned from this guy. He seemed very enthusiastic about his tool. After turning a five hour brush clearing job into 45 minutes I completely agree with the guy. This setup is great for brush and vines. Without this video I’d have no idea how effective this two blade cutter coupled with a trimmer could be.

https://youtu.be/PylNCZr06dY

https://youtu.be/sL-3wNUdPlE

Oi! That fits on a weed whacker? Looks quite murderous. I've fantasized about replacing the nylon wire with a more permanent baling wire solution, but this goes much further. The amazon link even has a rotating chain implement that looks like it came out of BattleBots or the Braindead movie.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zerodis-Trimme ... 07DKC63XQ/

Yes, it looks dangerous.

When my string ran out, I started using the attachment that came with my Ryobi electric trimmer:

https://images.homedepot-static.com/pro ... 4_1000.jpg

It works well, but I'm not trimming heavy brush.

Yeah, that kind of nylon blade attachment has the advantage of not leaving cord fragments all over. After years of landscaping service my yard is scattered with little hunks of that plastic line. Now I know why they come in bright fluorescent colors and earth tones. Depends if you want to collect them or not.

I tried using thin aircraft cable on my old electric trimmer to save money and reloading. But, it fell apart and I realized it could be throwing needles around at high velocities. So I’m back to mostly using 0.095” cord which seems to last a lot longer than the standard 0.065” stuff.

Ahh saving money. I suspect fuel economy will go down with the big blade. Given its extra injury risk I only plan to use it for infrequent brush clearing jobs. I can just picture myself putting it into my foot or slipping on my feet and getting it back in my face when I fall. As I say it looks dangerous though I haven’t had any problems. I’m not going to push my luck to save string even though it works well for routine trimming.

An update. I bought a new machine that further increases my efficiency (work_done/time_spent). 160cc gas power washer. It turns out these are much more effective for sweeping up leaves and cuttings than a power blower. I think it’s all about the engine displacement and momentum transfer rate of the water vs. air.

I learned from this genius.
https://youtu.be/yFrtM_TdKng

And this guy.
https://youtu.be/bWnpFz_L3Gw

Not to mention I can wash down the patios and walls and really brighten the place up. It takes about 20 min to clean up 1/2 an acre.

So I mow, hedge trim, and cord trim. Then I gather up the debris using the power washer as a power rake of sorts. It is really fast. Once I have everything piled up on the back garden area I run the mower on top of the pile in mulching mode (the mower is a mulch, side and back bag). It reduces the pile to about 5% the volume of the original leaves and grass and spreads it out all under gasoline power. The mower is AWD and climbs the mound of cuttings effortlessly till it is reduced down to little 1/4” square chits.

Then nature takes its course and it all disappears leaving nice soil. And a watered lawn.

I know it's not the kind of help the thread is discussing but I'll add another type of strategy: enjoy doing the work.

- Use your yard work as time for mindfulness and mental decompression - a time to think about nothing, a time to enjoy your land rather than battle it with combustion-engine machines. Use manual tools powered only by your body - reel mowers, scyth, those hedge trimmers that are basically giant hand scissors, machetes, etc. Doing things this way will also leave your senses more available for observing things
- And/or - use it as a time to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc. Sometimes I get into periods where I basically feel I don't have any good time for listening to such things (since I don't want to just sit in a chair and listen while otherwise doing nothing)
- Consider your lawn work as part of your fitness regimin. Make sure you do things ergonomically. Even consider doing some things in ways that are more physically difficult than really needed.

Yeah that’s why I call out efficiency as work done/time spent. There are other ways to look at efficiency. Work done/carbon burned, work done/discomfort.

I think you’re talking about minimizing discomfort or even flipping it’s sign and making it pleasure.

I’m trying to spend as little time cleaning the place so I can do other things. The clearing is an evil I have to deal with to keep the county off of me.

best method to minimize yard work: don't have a yard.

Saying this only half tongue-in-cheek: apartments are usually cheaper to buy, cheaper to heat (might be insulated by surrounding units), cheaper to mantain (no roof to break etc), no yard to tend or maintain (this might limit prospects for subsistence faming however) + apartment buildings are usually located more centrally and are better connected to public transportation.

From purely frugal / resource use POV, living in an apartment is better.

I cleaned my yard yesterday. I have 3/4 of an acre of shrubs and lawns. About four hours of work singlehanded performed once a month.

Recently CA passed a bill to eliminate gas powered outdoor lawn care tools - blowers, mowers and trimmers. I think this will change the way the work is done and also the yards and kinds of shrubbery.

Right now the strategy is hire a team of workers to come through in a blaze with roaring high powered gas tools and then disappear. I get the idea my neighbors really don’t like their help and want them to get it over with and leave. They kick up a lot of dust, make exhaust and noise. But they’re fast. The part most people complain about is their neighbor’s crew not their own. But bottom line they want the nameless and faceless to get it done and leave.

This strat is going to be hard with battery power. While the electric stuff has come a long way in power and capacity it cannot compete on metric of cutting rate both instantaneous and average with gas. It may soon but now, no way. I notice my neighbors use rechargeable stuff for touch ups but hire the immigrant crew to do the majority of the heaving lifting in one weekly blitz. The duration of the neighbors trimming is directly correlated to their batteries. It all works for them though.

So I was thinking after blitzing my yard that the neighbors will probably be faced with higher bills or smaller yards and lawns. More encounters with people they’d normally prefer not to associate with. It is going to force a change in landscape so to speak.

My yard has evolved already. It was necessary to reduce visits to once a month. I don’t water to keep growth down (also we have a drought). I removed over half of the shrubs we had when we used an immigrant crew. I let them go many years ago. I bought high powered professional gear like theirs but intentionally avoided two stroke motors because premix looks carcinogenic.

Anyhow just got me thinking. I’ll be looking for the changes. I really think planting will change in the CA suburbs. It’s funny, the neighbors hate everyone else’s crew. They never complain about the smoke and noise from their own. And they close the blinds when they work. It is another business like food prep, meat cutting and custodial. Most people want to flip on the lights and everything is nicely put out for them. The last thing they want to see eye to eye is their “help”.

My yard is clear for the next thirty days.

Or they will use tools with a long cable that they ask you to plugin to the nearest socket.

I think there are limits on how much power one can get out of a socket.

I can safely get 1 kw from my dinky socket on my patio. My walk behind mower is 4.2kW. Funny how these numbers have gone up since I was a kid. I thought 2kW was a powerful mower back then.

I had a corded mower in the Bay Area when I had a tiny lawn. It was really a good tool in that situation. Quiet. Zero maintenance. Clean. Sufficiently powerful but no self propulsion. It felt more like a vacuum cleaner than a mower.

I am really happy with my cordless chainsaw. No more gas for me. It is such a wonderful pruning tool. I’ve removed small trees with it. But I never make more than twenty cuts at a time.

I think battery tech will leap ahead in the next decade. There are a lot of forces pushing it forward. Right now I think it’s a stretch to do large yard maintenance with lithium batteries. Housing development common areas cannot be realistically managed using current electric offerings. But that will undoubtedly change over time. Likely before the CA 2024 phaseout. I look forward to seeing new batteries.

@Sclass

Has the CA power grid had any issues with handling the new load of electrification for vehicles, housing, lawn equipment, etc? I imagine the wildfires have also increased demand for air conditioners and air filtration units, which also suck up a lot of power. I’m curious to see how this plays out since I imagine we will see the same transition in other USA locations in the coming decade.

I don’t know. Elon Musk has said the infrastructure needs to be improved for electric cars. Not sure if we have crossed that line yet.

There are competing forces. Efficiency has gone up a lot. For example my in-law’s plasma TV from 2000 draws almost a kilowatt. I have an equivalent sized LED TV that is powered by a little laptop power supply. But I guess hooking an electrical car to your mains will cancel those gains out.

I thought the power grid fires in CA were caused by lack of maintenance and not overloading. They seem to happen during high winds, not high tension wires glowing red and melting. At least in he Bay Area and Orange County where I live the power company cannot keep up wih tree growth. I’m afraid I’m not an authority on this.

Not specific to CA, but my power grid engineering friends talk a lot about the upgrades for home charging that will bring about the most change. Currently, the cars are mostly charged slowly at home with 120v/20 amp systems. This is mostly completed at night when the overall energy system loads are lower, but it takes a long time to recharge the batteries. It will be interesting to see if incentivizing these types of home upgrades through tax credits will do more for adoption than putting in more "electric fueling stations" out and about. I also wonder how that might translate into other electric gadgets like lawn mowers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-c ... 1629916313