LIVING THE DREAM FOR A DOLLAR AN ACRE
Innovative tools for home, lawn and garden, including: mowing machines, walking tractors and hand trimmers.
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Appropriate technology at its finest: the low-wheel cultivator is a fine upper-body workout machine
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WE TEST THE BEST, PART I
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By John Vivian
The most innovative tools for home, lawn, and
garden.
Every few years, MOTHER likes to spot the latest
earth-friendly trends in home gardening and
grounds-keeping, then survey relevant new tools, products,
and services, to see which might be commended to readers.
As for trends this spring of 1998 — less than two
years from a new century — we are gratified to note
the recent growth in popularity of both purchased and
home-grown organic foods. These wholesome edibles are
raised the natural way, without toxic pest controls, by
using compost and mulches rather than chemical fertilizers
that degrade earth and that are mostly derived from our
planet's finite petroleum reserves.
We are even more pleased. to note that these new, more
natural home-planting schemes often replace wasteful
expanses of lawn that are a holdover from hardworking,
egalitarian America's uncharacteristic penchant for
mimicking the estate grounds of Europe's idle, rich, landed
gentry.
New Life for Our Least Favorite Tool?
As an added benefit, householders who replace their lawns
with native-life meadow or garden can recycle MOTHER'S
least-favorite homeowner machine: the noisy, smoke-belching
rotary-blade lawn mower. These savage devices persist
because, even though pricey and more-safety-conscious
models are available, the average backyard specimen is sold
for about $100 — a fraction of the cost of the more
effective and much safer powered reel-mower. The
inefficient throw-away engines of these cheap mowers
pollute our air and make a racket. Their 2,500 rpm
revolving blades can eject rocks at virtually bullet
velocity. Their tiny wheels and a low pancake shape make
them tend to flip or slide on uneven terrain and hills. It
is too easy to slip a foot under one on slick, wet grass.
Operated in the typical, macho, American way —
without heeding, or so much as reading, safety directions,
and bypassing inconvenient safe-operating controls —
rotaries are indirectly responsible every year for
thousands of limb-maiming injuries. When operated around
small children, they're even more dangerous.
To give these mowers a fair shake, we purchased an example
of the industry's best effort at producing a safe rotary.
On sale at a major chain department store, it was made by
an anonymous member of the evershrinking number of North
American lawn-equipment makers, and its safety and
convenience features brought the cost to better than four
times the price of the basic El Cheapo rotary. For the
added bucks, we got a cast-metal housing, a clean-burning,
quiet, and powerful Tecumseh engine, self-propelled front
wheels, high rear wheels, the option of mulching or bagging
the clippings, and an electric key-start. The machine
rolled out of the box ready to raise the handle, add oil,
gas up, and go. Before going out to mow, we gave it the
preventive-maintenance treatment described in more detail
below.
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