Spiral: A rectangle around the perimeter, with a short detour for the tree lawn, then progressively smaller rectangles to the center, making allowances for my little Japanese maple.
Except that since last year I’ve had to pay someone else to do it. I’ll be having open-heart surgery later this year, so it’ll probably be 2014 before I can mow the lawn again. Same with using the snow blower. It’s nice to pay someone else to do it . . . but this is for all the wrong reasons.
My partner, who lives next door, has never done his own yard work. He never had a yard when he was a kid in NYC, and wouldn’t know how.
I’ve got a very irregularly shaped yard due to it being at the end of a cul-de-sac.
Ring around the front yard, then sequential E-W rows.
Ring around the back yard including east side yard, then sequential N-S rows
Pattern gets broken by swingset-rose garden. Mow between these items and deck in E-W rows, then resume the N-S sequential pattern.
N-S rows get interrupted by mock orange bushes, mow a triangular patch in front of them in a spiral, then resume N-S pattern to get to W edge of yard.
Mow the W side yard and W front sliver of front yard in a perimeter-then row attack.
Mutter about how long the process takes and go shower.
Throughout my high school years, my summer job was to mow grass for the city where I lived - the parks, berms on boulevards, city building areas - and this is how we were told to mow it; different directions each time you mowed. We even had a weekly chart showing which direction we mowed the last time.
I hated that job.
The humidity, crap that you would accidentally run over with your mower (tissues, baseballs, newspapers, cans, bottles, bee hives, gas nozzles, water sprinkler nozzles, poison ivy etc.). I will never forget the summer where it rained every single weekend (destroying my fun time) and the grass grew so fast we couldn’t keep up with all the locations.
No, I didn’t hate that job - I loathed it from every fiber in my body.
So would I. But I literally can’t hire anyone to cut it the way I want it.
I use a standard mower, and I use the higher settings because IMHO it’s better for the health of the grass. Also, FWIW, my yard is a less than completely smooth surface.
Anyone around here who mows lawns for money uses a riding mower, lawn tractor, or whatever they call them these days. I always ask them to use the highest setting, and the highest setting for a riding mower always seems to clock in at about what a medium setting would be on my mower, which I regard as too short.
Also, because the width of the riding mower’s cut is considerably larger than that of my 22" mower, it’s less sensitive to variations in the surface of the yard. Between that and the lower blade, everyone who uses a riding mower on my lawn has the grass shorter than 1" in places with irregular contours, and I’ve had instances of where they literally mowed down to the dirt in those spots.
So I’ve given up. It’s easier to mow my own damned lawn, than to have to deal with paying yet another kid to mow my grass down to the dirt. I console myself with the knowledge that in six or seven years, I can hand the job off to the Firebug.
I voted “it varies” but 2/3 of the time it’s sequential rows. But both my front and back yards have a tree in the middle so it lends itself to spiral. I always start with a ring on the outside, tho.
I have heard that for best results cutting direction should be varied. So in the front yard, I alternate vertical and horizontal rows throwing in diagonal rows every few weeks (just to keep the grass off balance ).
The backyard has three distinct sections separated by landscaping so I just do each section longways.
Most of my yard is a pretty good incline, so I usually do the border and then rows perpendicular to the slope. A couple of times a year I’ll mix it up and do diagonal rows instead, and sometimes I say fuck it and hire my nephew.
Inward spiral which reverses direction every time I loop around an obstacle (e.g. bird bath, shrub). It is also required to do a Curly “Woo woo wooo woo…” noise while looping around small obstacles.
I voted “spiral”, but it depends. In the backyard, I do a spiral that starts at the perimeter and works inward, but I switch to sequential rows for the last four passes or so (rather than start making ridiculously smaller and smaller spirals.)
In the front yard, it’s mostly sequential, except for a part where I have to go around some obstacles that I do perpendicular to the rest of the lawn.
I said some other pattern because my lawn is pretty bizarre in shape. I’m on a hill, and there’s no real border to the lawn - the grass just kind of tapers off into wild grasses. Sometimes I mow them and sometimes I don’t. Some of the slopes are steep enough that I can only mow them in one direction. I have a pattern, but it’s ridiculously complex.
Amorphous - I have a bunch of beds and stuff in my lawn, so there is no real pattern to it. You guys are making me appreciate living in a semi-arid area - I don’t water the grass until it’s damned near dead, and I don’t have to mow too much.
I never bother with a pattern or anything like that. We have a lot of yard but a good portion of it is moss, which I don’t mow, no grass due to arborvites, or a grass/weed mix that we generally only mow once a month (or every other month). I’d be ok with just ripping it all up and putting in flowers and stones and water but my boyfriend seems to have this obsession with having a lawn one day.
Fairly similar. except that my lawn is so dinky I use a push mower. The lawn care book I read said that varying directions is better for the lawn. Any my lawn is too small to do diagonals.
I actually do NS, EW, and then helix on alternating weeks.
I have a gigantic lawn (much to my displeasure), probably about 2 acres with assorted buildings, trees, shrubs, mysterious septic field obstacles, culverts, bathtubs, windmill towers, burn pits, and piles of silver maple leavings awaiting burning scattered randomly about. Part of the perimeter descends steeply into a drainage ditch, and another part of it ascends steeply to the road. It used to take me 6 hours to mow it when I tried to use a system; now I just race around on my mower like the Keystone Kops are after me, paying no heed to my personal safety, going around the trees on 2 wheels, and I get it done in 3-1/2 hours.
Since I use a riding lawnmower, I always use the (square) spiral technique. The idea is to maximize the amount of time I am actually cutting grass. Cutting rows requires one to drive of the edge of the square then do a giant loop to turn around and face the opposite direction, or to have to do some manipulations after going in reverse, which both takes time and is slower than any forward gears. (Yes, eventually you have to switch to rows for the same reason, but that’s towards the end.)
Rows with a push mower are not nearly so inefficient, so I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
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