{"id":2791,"date":"2008-05-07T02:48:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T06:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/2008\/05\/time-to-mow\/"},"modified":"2010-12-30T12:00:58","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T17:00:58","slug":"time-to-mow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/2008\/05\/time-to-mow\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to Mow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mowing<\/a><\/p>\n

As April turns to May, apple blossoms<\/a> follow forsythia<\/a> and it’s time to mow<\/a> the lawn. When I was growing up, lawn mowers were made of cast iron and had to be pushed. When I was seven, my parents bought an old house<\/a> whose lawn had grown to hay. Instead of a real lawn mower Dad bought a Simplicity<\/a> garden tractor<\/a>, complete with cultivator<\/a>, snow plow<\/a>, weed cutter<\/a>, cordwood saw<\/a> and, most important, sickle bar<\/a>. Until our wilderness was tamed that sickle bar was our only mower.<\/p>\n

Eventually it was supplanted by a succession of rotary mowers, all of which had to be followed on foot. I longed for a riding machine, like my cousin’s Tiger<\/a> tractor, the Beaver<\/a> that cut the lawn at my school, or one of the ubiquitous Bolens<\/a> tractors in town. The big estates had Locke gang mowers<\/a>, which I coveted, though when I got a job at one I was relegated to a Jacobsen<\/a> professional machine, which I still had to walk behind. I remember Dad telling me about the Coldwell<\/a> mower, which was water cooled<\/a>, but I never saw one.<\/p>\n

With a home of my own, I, too, acquired a series of cheap rotary mowers. At one point we experimented with a Flymo<\/a>, the British hovercraft mower, but it was electric and prone to cut its own cord. Finally we bought a Lawn Boy<\/a>, at what seemed like an astronomical price. With the grass catcher it does a nice job, but after nearly 25 years is wearing out. Parts are expensive, if you can find them, and the equivalent model today costs nearly $700. To be sure, we have a riding mower<\/a>, too, a generic Wal-Martian, but I prefer the Lawn Boy in the garden<\/a> and orchards, where the big machine is hard to maneuver<\/a>. It’s best suited to the back forty<\/a>. So is the Gravely<\/a>, which I seldom use for mowing. I still have the Simplicity tractor<\/a> and sickle bar<\/a>, but have never had grass tall enough to use them.<\/p>\n

So how do we replace the Lawn Boy..? We’re going electric without the cord<\/a>. I’ll let you know how it works out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As April turns to May, apple blossoms follow forsythia and it’s time to mow the lawn. When I was growing up, lawn mowers were made of cast iron and had to be pushed. When I was seven, my parents bought an old house whose lawn had grown to hay. Instead of a real lawn mower….<\/span>
Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2791"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3283,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions\/3283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}