Would you swap your lawn mower for a robot?

Hi Mike, in the off chance that you might see this I am keen to know about your dealings with the Irish dealer. I don’t expect you to name him on here, but even the area he is in would be useful. I am in Ireland and having problems with a dealer here. I believe he may have had the dealership taken away, but we didn’t know it at the time.

I agree with Caroline. My Husqvarna 430X is brilliant. It copes with narrow passages, steep slopes, rough ground and odd-shaped areas. It’s near-silent and never damages anything left in its path. The condition of the lawn has improved significantly because of the microscopic cuttings being constantly deposited on it (the mower is programmed to run twice for a couple of hours, most days). It doesn’t take space in my garage – in winter, it hangs on the wall. I don’t have to buy oil or fuel, cope with a cable, or charge a very expensive Rotak Li battery. We don’t need a grass heap and our green bin is now free to take other garden waste. We just came back from a 4-week holiday and the lawn looks just as we left it, except perhaps some of the edges. We LOVE it!

Hi Diane – Which? has some useful advice here: https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/lawn-mowers/article/what-is-a-robot-lawn-mower

It might be worth looking at having it cut as an alternative to a robotic mower, or take your son in hand. 🙂

Diane, rather than struggle to cut your lawn or spend a lot on a robot mower that may not do a good job, particularly on a slope, I’d find someone local who could regularly cut it for you.

I would recommend that as well. Booking a regular mowing service will take a weight off your mind – especially if bad weather makes it impossible for you to do it safely.

Some people just do mowing and have a number of mowers suitable for all situations. A gardener will usually not come with a mower and will expect to use yours. Both types will use your garden waste bin for the cuttings.

Round here the gardening contractors always bring their own mowers, strimmers, etc. If cutting the grass is hard work then it’s best to get the contractor to take away the clippings because a bin full of grass would be heavy for anyone who is disabled.

Grass clippings less than an inch are good for your lawn, and act as a fertiliser for the soil so don’t put them in your bin, unless you are maintaining your local bowling green or tennis courts!

Where I live the open green spaces are maintained by the local council who appear about once every two weeks on a large sit on tractor which mows and leaves the cuttings behind.

The trouble is, and here’s the rub, neighbours let their kids out to play, even though they all have their own gardens, and so pay an annual fee for a private contractor to mow and collect the cuttings which then don’t end up in their homes. I stopped contributing as the volume of kids increased with wig-wams, scooters, bicycles and bouncy castles to boot!

My regular gardener retired last year and hasn’t been replaced and so I have been mowing my own grass. Contractors in my area are not very reliable. They will happily turn up for a ‘one off’ job, charge you a large sum and you are lucky if you see them again.

What you need is someone local who has retired but active and happy to do jobs for sensible money. I might be just round the corner, Beryl?

I have a fair amount of lawn in a longish garden. One of the chores was regularly lugging a full
grass box down to the compost heap. When I decided to ease the mowing job by getting a larger self-propelled mower it also had an optional mulching feature that supposedly chopped the clippings finer and deposited them back on the lawn to feed it, a good thing to do as Beryl points out.

I ignored this at first – tread cuttings into the house? – but now use it routinely unless the grass has grown a little too long. It works well and reduces the cutting time even further. More time for weeding.

In Norwich, the City Council’s waste contractors have a list of elderly and disabled people who need assistance with their bins and they will pull them from wherever they are located to the refuse wagon and return them empty to their original position.

There is also a unit that goes around cleansing and sterilising refuse bins for a payment although I think that is a private company, but they seem to have a lot of clients. That is one job I quite enjoy doing myself.

I remember when I was young that the bin men (as they were known) always collected the bins from the back of the house and replaced them. Those were the days when an attendant would fill your car up with petrol and check your oil, when your doctor would visit you or see you the same day, when a letter posted the night before arrived in the morning, and public transport was cheap……..

I think you are latitude directly paralleled east of me Malcolm or closer than you realise. I know I have actually been in the same room as Wavechange on at least one occasion but chose to remain anonymous as he was otherwise occupied at the time 🙂

Lawns keep better and are easier to maintain if mowed when still short. We have regular visitors from the river which I feed on a daily basis who in return will naturally fertilise the grass at the front of the house.

I’m intrigued, Beryl. I’m happy for Jon or George to pass on my email address and you could let me know more. I hope I was being polite.

I expect that Diane is bemused by these discussions and it would be good to hear from her again.

Thanks for that Catie. I will be looking for a landscape gardener soon to quote for a local council site that is badly in need of attention.

Wavechange, Jon and George or their predecessors will know the venue as it was a Which? event. You were hot on a sugar trail at the time 🙂

Beryl – I must have a double because I have never been to any Which? events. Sorry.