Mowing Our Yard

Finally...as promised, a blog post about the mowing of our yard. Someone guessed that maybe our yard was being cut with manicure scissors. Good guess...and honestly that would have probably been faster than the method used.

When I was looking at houses, this house by far had the most landscaping of any that I saw. Our landlord has obviously spent a small fortune on making the yard look nice. Therefore, we have an agreement with our landlord that he will take care of hiring the gardener...I figured this way if the yard starts to look bad, he can't blame it on us.

We moved into our house on August 1. I see the gardener lady that our landlord has hired out in the yard every day all day long working away. Well on our inventory list of items that came with the house, an electric lawn mower was listed...as I had never seen this, I asked the landlord about it, and he told me that it was out in the guard shack. Fine, I thought...shouldn't be any problem then mowing the yard.

When we lived in central Illinois, we mowed our grass at least once per week. This normally started in April and lasted through October. At our last house in Morton, we had a push mower as our yard was pretty hilly and had some good slopes to it. We had a fairly good size yard...I'm guessing probably a half acre or so. I don't remember exactly how long it took to mow, but I'm guessing that it would take 3 to 4 hours (depending on whether or not we mowed the back yard...which since I'm pretty lazy and the back yard couldn't be seen from the street didn't get mowed every week).

Anyway, after moving into our house here, I wasn't really too worried about the yard...didn't really pay too much attention to it, since I think it looks pretty good. The landlord comes by every so often to check it out, so I figured it's up to him to say something to the gardener if he didn't like the way it looked. However, I did make the comment to S around the first weekend in September about whether or not they were ever going to mow the grass.

Yep! That's right...in the first month we lived in the house, the grass had not been mowed. In my opinion, it was getting pretty high...just easier for snakes to hide out. Anyway, two days after I said this, low and behold the doorbell rings (about 9:30am)...it's our head security guard asking me to open the sliding glass door on the front porch as the grass was going to be cut that day. They needed access to an electrical outlet to plug the lawn mower in.

Well, I look out the window to check out this electric lawn mower (I have seen a few in the U.S. but just not that common). What a sight I saw...it was taking 4 people to cut our grass! One guy pushing the mower, one guy holding the cord out of the way, the gardener lady raking the cut grass out of the way, and one of our security guards watching (OK, so maybe there were only 3 people doing the actual work, but it was quite the sight). Anyway, I watch for a couple of minutes and then go about my own business for the day...I sort of forgot that they were mowing the grass until around 5:30 pm when the doorbell rings, and the security guard tells me that they are done cutting the grass and that I can unplug the cord and shut the sliding door.

Yikes! It took them 8 hours to cut our grass...the yard here is probably half the size of our yard in Morton...so I'm guessing a quarter of an acre or so. There are quite a few more things to mow around here, but still it shouldn't take them 8 hours to finish the yard. Well, guess what...it would actually take them much more than 8 hours, because they weren't even close to being finished at the end of day one.

This is what our yard looked like at the end of the first day. Can you tell what part has been cut?

Yes, those are piles of grass clippings...I told S there was enough grass in our yard to feed all of the stray cows wondering around Chennai. I tried to talk my dad into bringing his hay baler to bale the grass. Is it a good sign when the yard looks dead after cutting the grass? In the U.S., we try to cut the grass frequently enough that it doesn't look that obvious when it has been cut. I guess that's not the norm here though.

Well the second day of the grass mowing did not involve cutting of any grass...it involved hauling all of the clippings from the previous day out of the yard. Yes, this took a whole day. After that, it pored rain, so our yard looked like this until a week later when they decided to finish the job. The only thing is, they wouldn't finish on the 3rd day either. I believe the 4th day involved hauling of more grass clippings out...by this time, I was really losing interest in this whole process.

We went to Dubai...and the mowing of the yard still wasn't finished. By the time we got back, it was finally done (so I'm guessing it took 5 or 6 full days to cut our grass)...and the brown looking yard was starting to look green again. We have been back from Dubai for a week now...normally, it would be time to mow the grass again. Obviously not the case in India...now I am curious to see how long they wait this time before cutting it again.

I also wonder what they would say if I told them that in the U.S. we cut our grass at least once if not twice a week. Also, I don't know...it may be a quicker process if they didn't wait until it was so tall. Just a thought though. Here is a photo of the poor guy pushing the mower.

Now our yard is perfectly flat...I took this photo out of an upstairs window...this guy is really putting a lot of effort into pushing the mower because the grass is so tall. Of course this is India...they can't make things easy...but maybe manicure scissors would at least be quicker, probably not easier, but quicker.