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
695 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91101
626-449-5320

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.