I have the good fortune of working at home most days, and it’s great. But one downside is that many of my neighbors are fairly well-off retirees who hire professional gardeners to care for their lawns, and the noise is distracting! Mowers, weedeaters, lawn edgers, and leaf blowers — they all seem to use gasoline-powered equipment, many of them with really loud two-cycle motors. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they could just all agree to synchronize their gardener days, maybe have all the noise on Saturday mornings or something? Or better yet, what if they used quiet, human-powered lawn tools? It is possible, you know, and here’s what I’ve learned…

Push-Reel Mowers

The last place we lived in Utah had such a tiny yard that I didn’t buy a gas-powered mower when we moved in — I had long considered getting an old-fashioned push-reel mower, and this was the perfect opportunity to give it a try. It’s actually fantastic! As long as you don’t let the grass grow really long between mowings, and if you’re willing to hand-pull the occasional crabgrass stalk that resists the blades, it’s a really easy mower to use. Oh, and try not to run over twigs, because they’ll jam in the blades, but other than that, it’s pretty damn easy to use. And don’t buy a rusty old one from a garage sale — I had an old one once, and let’s just say my swearing vocabulary expanded a bit during that time. :) Find a newer model, and you won’t regret it.

There are also other advantages to push-reel mowers, besides being quiet:

• A cleaner cut of the grass, which also helps it stay healthier
• You get to burn a few calories (Hey, my fitness app says I burn something like 450 calories per hour doing yard work! Not sure it’s true, but it sounds great!)
• You never need to buy fuel
• No air pollution
• Less maintenance than a gas motor
• It’s safer, too (OMG, did you know gas-powered mowers are responsible for a large number of children’s amputations?! But still, don’t stick your finger in the blades of the push-reel mower, either, when they’re still turning!)

Anyway, now that I have a larger yard (about a quarter-acre), I have a gas-powered mower, but I find myself pulling out the push-reel much more often and enjoying the quiet exercise of old-fashioned lawn mowing.

Grass Shears

You don’t need a noisy weedeater (string trimmer, to be more precise), either! Although it might seem tedious, it turns out that it’s not so bad to sit in the grass and use these little grass shears to trim along places where the mower can’t reach. I’m really enjoying using mine, and avoiding the hassles of reloading trimmer string, having debris fly all over the place, and making noise with a string trimmer. I also found out that my large shrub shears work quite well to trim grass! And they’re great for covering a longer area quickly. I find them particularly useful around our new, large flowerbeds in the front yard, where the bark mulch flies all over the place if I try to use the string trimmer.

Other Human-Powered Tools

Of course, you can always use a rake instead of a leaf blower. Yes, it’s gonna be more work, but you need some core exercises, right? I do! And for edging the grass along a sidewalk, there are those hand-powered rotary edgers that look like a ninja star on a stick. They’re OK, but if you’re like me and only edge a couple times a year, they can be pretty hard to use. I think the lesson is, I need to start edging more often! Especially because my thrift-store-purchased electric edger just died last weekend. I think I’ll be giving the human-powered edger more use in the coming months! :)

How about you? Do you have any other human-powered tools you like to use for lawn care or other garden tasks? Tell us about them in the comments. Thanks for reading!