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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.

A quarter acre of St Augustine grass in Georgia produces about 5-10 of those 30 gallon yard waste bags full of grass clippings each week at the height of the growing season. The clippings cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it. It takes approximately 5 hours a week to maintain such a yard.

Similarly in the fall, the trees will produce similar amounts of leaves each week that also cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it.

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In Michigan we never removed grass clippings all year, the yard remained healthy. We also didn't use monoculture grass but a mix of 3 different types.

I really struggle to believe that people in Georgia with a lawn are spending 5 hours a week maintaining it. That's basically an entire weekend day. Why can't you mulch it, or use the clipping bag?

My grass grows quickly in Spring and Fall, but it takes about 20 minutes to mow it. I don't usually bother to pick up the clippings unless it's really long.

It's routine here to see people spending an hour every day maintaining their lawns. Over the course of a week they're pulling weeds, fertilizing, watering and patching their grass.

They have to or else it dies/gets overrun almost immediately. They get crispy after 2-3 days w/o water. Start dying in a week. Lawns here are a freaking nightmare to keep up.

Can't they use a robot mower? I'm in a northern climate, so lawns only grow from late April until late September, but around here more and more are getting robot mowers. They are completely silent and are continously cutting the grass. The clippings are so short that they can just stay on the lawn and functions as nutrient for the grass. So less fertilizer is needed, weeds will be cut constantly. So in theory you just need to water it if there's no rain.

Most people think of a lawn as rectangle of grass on a flat surface but most are not. In all but the southern parts of Georgia it's very hilly with most properties flowing down hill to a washout, creek, or pond. There's also a dense tree canopy over most properties older than 20 years which means lots of roots, acorns, pine cones, leaves, and pine needles.

Electric mowers and robots have fragile little blades designed to weight as little as possible because they're running on batteries. They'll be damaged or break entirely if they strike a root or rock.

I had to use a self propelled dual blade mulching power to handle the terrain and so I didn't have to spend an hour or more walking the property gathering all the pine codes and other crap that might stall out a lesser mower.

Robot mowers work on most lawns. If it's very bumpy or hilly you just need to go up in price. This summer I visited a farm with a huuuge lawn with trees, hills, rocks and what not. They had two Husquarna 4WD robot mowers and the lawn looked pretty nice.

In GA, with .25 acre of centipede, I'd say it's about 2 hrs/wk with heavy rain & sun (like recently). Less rain, 2 hrs / 3 wks. Push mower, slow & steady pace (it grows so thick, I can't just power walk it). Maybe St Augustine is very different from centipede.

Mulching seems to be fine if you cut along the rule of third (cut less than 1/3 of the thing at a time). Even side discharge seems ok, especially as you spiral over the discharge, re-mowing it.

I used to let it grow out, but thatch became an issue. Which is why raking them up makes sense (or dethatching).

Now I cut slightly on the short side, more often, which seems to naturally favor centipede over dandelions almost anywhere there's good sun & water & drainage. Nothing really beats mowed centipede, for me; letting it grow wild invites snakes et al, and paving it would be hot.

Anyone who would spend five hours clipping and dumping grass per week would spend hundreds of hours a year on a more challenging environment of the same size. You would have to move pretty slowly to accomplish that.

It's naive to think maintaining a yard is just walking your property once a week with a push mower.

If you have a tree canopy, as most older homes in Georgia do, then you have to contend with the debris from the trees (e.g. fallen limbs, leaves, pine needles, pine cones, acorns, etc). If you want the lawn to look nice you need to do edging, weeding, watering and fertilizer=. In Georgia most homes have "pine islands" that have some sort of ground covering like mulch or pine straw and contain plants ans shrubs you need to maintain.

I don’t think it’s naive. I don’t live in Georgia but I have mowed, trimmed and maintained yards of similar size and obstacle count many times. That list of additional chores doesn’t take long, especially if in the yard weekly so only incremental upkeep is required and no rarely done parts are difficult (large thorns, lots of sticks or walnuts, difficult edging etc.)

I don’t doubt a slow person or a meticulous lawnhead could fill the time, to be clear, but that same level of effort and speed should be applied to measuring the difficulty of maintaining a forested plot in order to make a useful comparison.

Doing a halfassed slap job in a half an hour each week while your property slowly deteriorates is not the same thing as maintenance. Also mowing a lawn at full sprint is going to quickly deteriorate your equipment.

I didn't downvote you but that's a bit silly. I assure you your lawn equipment can handle brisk walks for years.

Interesting, half my lawn is St. Augustine and with a simple mulching mower I have never had to collect clippings. (Coastal NC)

You don't typically plant St. Augustine that far north, maybe it's just not thriving?

Maybe I'm just used to the northern climate. Wild. It's nothing near that up here even when the growth is at its height.

Southern coastal soil holds zero nutrients. Nothing grows without heavy treatment and whatever you put in leaches away in weeks.

Of course it will if you cut and cart the future nutrients away each week while creating 'greenery' that is a monoculture entirely unattractive to animal life.

As long as you've got a water source, you can easily create a tiny patch of green that can survive for decades unattended - even in the midst of a desert.

Agreed, it's a struggle. We apply milorganite or similar biosolid product every third month to ensure the grass gets the nutrients it needs. Otherwise we get a spotty lawn, which in turn results in poor water retention and pooling.

> The clippings cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it.

I don't understand why clippings kill the grass. Can you explain?

There's a balance between how fast the grass grows and how often you cut it. If you want to cut your grass less often then you need to bag otherwise the large volume of clippings pile up on the grass and don't decompose.

In my case, my last lawn was St. Augustine which is a drought tolerant variety of grass typically planted in Florida or on golf courses because it requires less watering. In Georgia however there's no shortage of water so it thrived and during the peak growing season it would easily grow five or six inches a week.

So I could either mow twice a week, mow once week and bag, or rip up and re-sod the whole thing. None of which was really desirable.

I can understand if the grass is extremely long and it will cover it, so it will die. But it will rebound pretty quick anyway.

Otherwise, I always leave my clippings on my grass, even if decently long. The grass survive just fine.

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