I have always disliked mowing grass. It seems such an incredible waste of time and effort, especially when grass is the perfect food for so many animals. Grass should be grazed, not mowed.
Back in Montana, we couldn't grow much of a lawn anyway around the house and dog cottages, so rough pasture grass was what we had. This was easy to deal with, because all I'd have to do was hook up the rotary brush cutter to the tractor, make one run, knock it all down, and be done. With the climate there, the grass rarely ever grew back enough that I'd have to mow it a second time. Although this meant we had to carefully manage the pastures to ensure enough grass for grazing animals, for mowing humans, it kept things pretty simple and made mowing only an annual chore.
Welcome to New Hampshire.
Now, one of the big attractions for us of moving here, as blog readers know, is the lush grass and a climate that keeps grass growing all summer long — great for livestock.
The downside, of course, is that growing means mowing. When I got back here in mid-May to stay, I marveled at how green and rich the grass was around the house. I'd stand on the porch and look out over the lawns, loving the greenness of it all. After the second week I noticed, um, how fast it was growing. By the third week I finally realized, holy cow, I'm going to have to do something about this grass — it's getting really, really tall! That's when it dawned on me that we didn't even have a lawn mower. Oops.
The yards around the house are too small to use a tractor, and a tractor would have been too heavy and rough on these lawns anyway — especially for weekly mowings. And while I do detest mowing grass and believe nature intended it to be grazed, I wasn't about to bring our horses into the dog yards in the evenings to do my work for me. The last thing we need is a whole lot of dogs rolling in horse poop and eating it when they're not rolling in it. (That's not why we called it the Rolling Dog Ranch, by the way.) The two goats wouldn't eat enough to make a difference, so that wasn't an answer either.
No, I finally admitted that we needed a … gasp! … lawn mower.
What I detested even more than mowing lawns was lawn mowers themselves. Noisy, stinky things, always requiring maintenance when they weren't leaving you smelling like gas.
So after doing some research — quickly, because by then I swear the grass was growing an inch a day here — I decided to buy a battery-powered mower called the Neuton. (I considered an old-fashioned reel mower, but exercise is one thing we don't lack around here. If I could have a battery cut the grass while I pushed the mower, that was a good compromise.)
I was skeptical at first that a mower running on a rechargeable battery could really mow a lawn, but Alayne and I are now fans of this green machine. It really does work incredibly well. It's amazingly quiet, is completely clean and odor-free, and requires no maintenance other than plugging in the battery. On a full charge, and if the grass isn't out of control, we can do all four dog yards on one battery. I think that's probably close to, or maybe a bit more, than the 1/3 acre (.13 hectare) the company suggests you can get on one charge. If we've let the grass get too tall, we'll need to swap out for a fresh battery to get everything finished. The Neuton is also very light, so it's easy to push around.
It's so quiet, in fact, that the dogs pay no attention to it at all. If you click on the photo for a larger image, you can see blind Molly snoozing under the ramp. The dogs keep right on napping wherever they are, even as we push the mower around.
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Those ramps, by the way, have become the favorite place to nap these days. When I took that photo of the Neuton mower, there were at least four dogs under those ramps — Molly, Priscilla, Cedar and Spinner. Cedar is at the far left of the ramp in back — you can kind of make out the dark shape underneath. Two more dogs were under the other ramp you can't see in this photo, the one coming off the people wing. Originally we were going to put up lattice-work to finish off the ramps (like you see under the existing porch), but the dogs clearly enjoy "denning" underneath them so much we haven't done it. There are usually more dogs sleeping under the ramps now than there are on the bright, green lawn or on the beds on the front porch!
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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