Our neighbors think we’re a little odd. When it comes to landscaping, we tend to stick with pretty primitive devices. We’ve been using a reel mower for awhile now:

Our neighbor took pity on Dave and lent us his gas-powered mower when we first moved in and the grass got a bit long. But generally the reel mower works just fine. We barely had to mow in the summer anyway considering how dead our grass was looking. We do have a plug-in weed whacker though, we aren’t completely crazy.

More recently we’ve been expanding our tools selection. To try to bring our lawn back to life we got an aerator (the kind with two hollow prongs on the end of a pole that you stomp on with your foot) and a little hand-dispenser for fertilizer. And then to move the pieces of the yucca tree to the side yard and out of the way, we got a wheelbarrow and an axe:

When we bought the axe, the little old lady at the hardware store cash register gave us a “be careful” instead of the more normal “have a nice day”. We may have been grinning gleefully at the time.

I’ve gotten pretty good at responding to our curious/confused neighbors… “Oh, this is to make up for not going to the gym for the past two weeks.” They generally nod sagely to that. 🙂 Someday we’ll probably switch to less manual tools, but with a yard this size, these are working fine for us for now. Considering that we also don’t have much in the way of storage space, it’s nice to minimize the big/heavy tools when we can…