Mark picked up a commercial mower dirt cheap last week, and Saturday was its test run.  It's very powerful, but I'm not sure where it's going to fit in our permaculture mowing system yet.

My hope was that the new mower would be able to cut tall grass and leave it in one piece, to be dried into hay/straw for chicken bedding.  (I've found that mulched grass is suboptimal for that purpose.)  Unfortunately, the commercial mower works like a beefed up version of a typical lawn mower, so it chunks up the cut grass.

Instead, I think it's probably going to be our backup mower for when the grass grows so fast it's hard to mow with the mulching mower.  Since our last mowing a week or two ago, for example, the grass had already licked halfway up my calf.  We were glad to have the big mower's power even if we didn't get to keep the mulch!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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