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    Beauty,  tfurrows (circumlunar.space),  5/18/2018
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I went out and purchased a reel mower. Locally, I was able 
to find one at Home Depot, and another at Walmart. The one 
at Home Depot was nicer, and only cost a little more, so I 
went with it. It was a Scotts Elite (though, I'm not sure 
why anyone would call a reel mower "elite.")

In the last few days, I've mowed both the front and back 
lawns at the new house. Both lawns were mowed with a gas 
mower in tha past week (right before we closed,) so the 
grass wasn't out of control.  Per the instructions, and per 
what I've read online, I removed all twigs and sticks and 
pebbles from the yard before attempting to mow.

From the beginning I could tell that I was going to enjoy 
the reel mower. The sound and feel are very satisfying, and 
the process is neither complex, nor unforgiving, nor 
difficult, as I feared it might be. I left the height at the 
factory setting, which I admit I didn't even check.

I clipped/mowed in rows of about 16", as straight as I 
could. This didn't seem to matter quite as much as it does 
with a gas mower, since the blades weren't being folded down 
quite as much. The lawn was already mowed, but the reel 
mower helped it look even nicer.

After mowing at the new house, I decided to take the reel 
mower back to the vacation rental. Here in the rental we're 
under a fairly dense canopy of high, old trees. The yard 
isn't well maintained, and so the "lawn" is more of patchy 
grass and weeds, largely invaded with moss. Personally, I 
love the look of moss and detest grass, so I really, really 
like it. Plus, moss is very low maintenance. Even so, the 
weeds/grass patches were getting a little high, so I thought 
I'd try the reel mower on them.

The result was quite amusing. I read online that reel mowers 
aren't good for tall grass. It would be better to say that 
they're pretty much useless on anything taller than the 
reel. Instead of getting pulled into the blades and clipped, 
anything taller than the reel seems to get folded down and 
run over unscathed. In the end, the yard looked as if it 
were mowed with a magical mower; patches of grass were 
neatly cut, with tall thin wisps of weeds and grass popping 
out all over the place.

So at this point, I think I'm going to get a gas mower as 
well. I'm tempted to try out a scythe (who on gopherspace 
was writing about using one? I'm sure someone wrote about 
it...) I'd like to see how that manual process works. There 
was a small sort of scythe at the hardware store...