Neighborhood Neuton

Grass. It always needs to be mowed. I laugh at my friends who tell me they are mowing an acre or more and point out all the things they could be doing with their time instead. I am mean.

We've got an old gas mower that is miserable to start, has a left rear wheel that always gets loose during mowing which means that all mowing must be done with a wrench in my back pocket, and is loud and stinky. Mowing falls to me unless I tell Ben he must do it so I'm the one fighting this miserable machine.

When my neighbor mentioned that he wanted to buy a Neuton and was looking for people in the neighborhood interested in a Neuton-share I jumped on the opportunity. We've got five families using the mower. We each have our own battery and will soon have our own charger -- they're currently on back order. I've mowed the lawn a couple of times with it and it's fairly equivalent to our other mower in weight and maneuverability but it's much quieter and doesn't stink. The battery lasts long enough to do our lawn which was a concern...that may not have been true of earlier versions.

Gary also got the edger for the mower but that doesn't work very well; it's hard to maneuver an entire lawnmower to get around all the oddball edges we've got around rocks and such in our yard so that quickly was categorized as not worth the bother which means that we're back to our normal process....no edging, just mowing as close as possible.

The community Neuton is still very new and we're all being very careful about not abusing it too much (our yards are all full of rocks though so the blades are bound to get fairly wrecked) so I'm optimistic that this will work out to be a very positive experience. But if it doesn't, perhaps I should just replace the entire lawn with AstroTurf.