Mowing your lawn green

My 4-year-old son helped me mow the lawn last weekend. Wait! Before you start regaling me with horror stories of your cousin Lou who cut off three toes while mowing in flip-flops, let me point out that my lawn mower is not self-propelled, and the blades rotate at an extremely slow pace — about as fast as the two of us can push it. We use a human-powered reel mower, just like Wally pushed in “Leave it to Beaver.”     While of course we both wear closed toe shoes, we don’t need earplugs. The mower, a basic hardware store model handed down from a friend, makes enough of a racket as the blades clatter against the self-sharpening bar that I can’t hear my kids from across the yard, but when my son and I are side-by-side, we can carry on a philosophical conversation.
“Why do we mow the lawn?” he asked me last weekend. It’s a question I puzzled over throughout my apartment- (and dorm-, and cabin- and tree-house-) dwelling youth. But now that I’m a bona fide homeowner, I have my reasons, including wanting to minimize the wildlife encounters (i.e. ticks and mice) right around our house, and even I have come to recognize that a tidy patch of lawn looks good, although I keep most of my five acres wild with unkempt black-eyed Susans, milkweed and woods.
To keep things simple I merely told my son, “So we can walk barefoot.” It’s much nicer to pad around on a mossy patch of shorn grass than through the brambly wilds that are rife with, as my children call them, “pokeys.”
Now I would be remiss if I did not mention that my lawn does not look like the manicured putting green of a golf course. Actual grass is outnumbered by plantain, clover, speedwell, bluets, violets and other wild ground cover, including moss. But we like the diversity of texture and color this mixture provides. Also, once the grass has gone to flower or seed, the mower is useless on the stems (although it continues to do a fine job on the grass blades themselves). I imagine if I mowed more often, I would be able to pre-empt this issue, but I much prefer lying in the hammock.
I use the reel mower and let the wild plants grow because I don’t want to introduce chemicals into the yard where my children run barefoot, chasing frogs and dragonflies, and I don’t want to fill their lungs (or my own) with the stinky exhaust of a gas-powered mower (lawn mowing creates up to 10 percent of our summertime air pollution). As a side benefit, the mower takes up very little space, does not require a complicated mixture of prayer, incantation and brute strength to get it started, and it never runs out of gas.
When my son and I reached the limits of our lawn, we came to a patch of grass too tall and thick for the mower to handle, I said, “Papa will have to do this part with his scythe.” Fortunately for me, the scythe, while sharing all of the environmental advantages of the reel mower, was built to my husband’s proportions and is decidedly not a safe activity to carry on with small children close by, so the two of us retired to the hammock to enjoy summer another way.
   This column was submitted by Andrea Lani, an environmental specialist with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Bureau of Air Quality. In Our Back Yard is a weekly column of the Maine DEP. E-mail your environmental questions to infodep@maine.gov or send them to In Our Back Yard, Maine DEP, 17 State House Station, Augusta, ME 04333.