Eye Level Pasadena

Food Not Lawns

Heather Flores will be discussing and signing her book, Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community, tonight at Vroman’s at 7:00 p.m.

Green LA girl has more information about Food Not Lawns here.

Vroman’s Bookstore, Thursday, May 17, at 7 p.m. Heather Flores discusses and signs Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community. (More information available on the Vroman’s website.)

Vroman’s Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91101
626-449-5320

Mowing the lawn

We’re looking for ways to conserve money around our house, so I decided to start mowing the lawn myself. I have fond memories of my dad mowing the lawn with a push mower on Saturdays when I was growing up, and also I remembered some of Roger’s posts at Easy Green about how much pollution gas-powered lawn mowers can emit, so I knew I wanted a manual push mower.

These websites helped me figure out what exactly I wanted:

• People Powered Machines: Which Manual Push Reel Mower is Right for You?
• Epinions.com: Reel Mowers
• Reelmowerguide.com: Guide to choosing and using a manual reel mower

We have some St. Augustine grass, so a Brill would have been too lightweight for us. I decided on the Scotts 20-inch manual reel mower without the grass catcher. (Grass clippings are good for the lawn and I’d heard that the grasscatcher didn’t actually fit this mower all that well.) I assembled the handle Friday night while I was watching a movie, and I went outside in the dark with Gavin holding a flashlight so I could test it out as soon as the movie was over. It was solid and easy to push and a little addictive. I finished half of our front lawn by flashlight because it was so satisfying. Saturday morning I got up early to finish the rest of the front and all of the back. I’m pretty out of shape, but even so it was just a light workout. The blades are quiet enough that I can mow without worrying about waking up the neighbors. I could hear birds chirping. It felt good to be outside in the early morning pushing the lawn mower around, watching the grass clippings fly and listening to the birds.

The organic urban homesteading family at Path to Freedom here in Pasadena is posting how-to and informational videos on YouTube.