Riding the big John Deere lawn mower (officially known as a lawn tractor), the sun beating down in the 90 degree heat, I began to wonder who invented this grass cutting thing anyway. Finally finishing the backyard, or the back 40 as I like to put it, I staggered into the house where the air conditioning greeted me and collapsed into a big comfy chair while I sipped on my glass of iced tea. I thought surely there’s a better way. But when I began to think about that horrible push mower my family used when I was a kid, maybe I don’t have it so bad.

Lawn mowers have come a long way from the poor guy who had to use a scythe to smite the tall grass. According to my research in the wikipedia, Edwin Budding invented the first lawn mower in 1827 for cutting sports fields and large expensive gardens.

I found this fact interesting and not surprising because the average Joe probably didn’t have a green lawn. When I was young and we would visit relatives living in the farming country, most didn’t have carpeted grass like today. What they did have were chickens and goats. Chickens ran loose in the yard constantly pecking at the ground, gobbling up bugs and ticks and the such. Goats were a natural lawn mower because they were staked out in different parts of the yard and ate everything they could reach.

Recouping a little bit from my heat drained experience, I returned to wikipedia. Another 10 years after Mr. Budding’s lawn mower patent, a machine was developed that was pulled by animals, and 60 years later, a steam-powered mower was developed. The first human-pushed mower was developed by Elwood McGuire in 1870. After World War II a company called JP Engineering produced a range of chain-driven mowers that could be pulled behind an animal and the driver could ride on, and thus the riding mower was born.

The reel mower is really the first lawn mower I remember seeing anyone use. According to wikipedia, this gives grass the cleanest cut of all mowers, and allows the grass to heal quickly. Not that I have anything against grass, but in the sultry heat of summer, it wouldn’t bother me if it had a long recuperative period.

And then we move into the lawn mowers we’re more familiar with today, the gasoline-powered rotary mower and the electric mower. Actually, with the electric mower, there is the cordless model and the kind with a long electrical connection cord. One of the big advantages of the electric mower is the engine runs must quieter than the gasoline-powered. The disadvantage of the mower with the electrical cord is that you have to be careful not to run over the cord while mowing, something easier than you would think. This could not only stop your mower, there’s always that chance of an eye-popping shock.

So by the time my tea glass was empty and the sweat had started to dry, I realized that maybe my comfortable John Deere zooming over my several acres wasn’t so bad after all. But I’m still going to check into that idea of buying a goat.