Desert Garden-
Green Garden Tools
By Daphne Richards
I don’t know if I’m proud or ashamed to admit it, but I don’t watch YouTube videos. Neither do I shop on eBay, write a blog or visit chat-rooms. I actually do have a My Space page. I posted it about six years ago at the urging of my friend Phil, who lives in Austin and thought it would be a great way for us to keep in touch without actually speaking. (He’s got a few more tattoos than me, is far more hip than I will ever be and has a lot more time on his hands. Needless to say, we lost touch.)
While admittedly cyber-retarded, I do know my way around the web. I like to look at all kinds of information while I’m putting my thoughts together for these articles, so recently when I started working on this one, the first thing I did was Google “green gardening tools.” I’m mostly looking for inspiration and a new perspective before I choose a writing path, and this time I found it on YouTube, in a minute-long video called “my orange push reel mower,” set to the tune of Green Acres. Talk about inspiration! That was just the inanity that I needed. And now, I actually do want to tell you about a few of my favorite environmentally friendly gardening tools.
Reel Mower
If you have a lawn and you’re concerned about the environment, but you’re not quite ready to hop on your mountain bike and commute to work, you should purchase a reel mower. One of the websites that I visited claimed that a typical gas-powered lawn mower emits more smog-causing particles in an hour than a new car does in five hours. The same site claimed that more fuel is spilled each year by people filling up their lawn mowers than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. Since I couldn’t find a reference for those statements, I have no way of knowing if these claims are factual. But even if the numbers are only half-true, they’re still pretty startling. And no matter where the real truth lies, the bottom line is that using a tool with zero emissions is much better for the environment than using one that emits clouds of foul-smelling black smoke.
One of the major complaints I hear about reel mowers is that they don’t do a good job once the grass gets too tall. I think the answer to that is obvious--don’t let the grass get too tall before you mow it! It’s actually very unhealthy for grass to remove more than one-third of its total height. Once allowed to grow too tall, turf grass is shocked when a large amount of leaf surface is removed. So if you want to keep your lawn about an inch and a half tall, you should mow once it reaches about two inches.
When I recently visited local nurseries in search of the types of tools I wanted to recommend, there wasn’t a whole lot of variety, especially when it came to reel mowers. So I looked online at some of the major home improvement sites and found a lot more to choose from. Lowe’s, Home Depot, Ace Hardware and even Wal-Mart had reel mowers to order, in prices ranging from about $80 to over $250. And there were plenty of other specialty sites to choose from as well.
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