Dana: When my parents came up on the way to St. Louis, we had them bring some rakes. As kids, we each had a rake so that we could all work in the yard together. That was great, but it means that my parents had 6 or 7 rakes!

B&B: Longer term, we’d definitely like to convert more of the lawn into garden (or at least xeriscaping). Our only concern is that the septic field is somewhere in front of the house and we don’t really want to grow food above that. Perhaps flowers or something instead.

Once we get settled in, Maggie plans to get a couple of chickens. Personally, I’m more excited about having bees, but the don’t help with the mowing!

We also need to get some sort of mower. We don’t have a lot of grass (yay!), but I’m kind of worried that what we do have right now is too long for a reel mower, at least for the first pass. Continuing to ignore it until it goes away probably isn’t the best solution, though. We could also use a goat to eat all the poison ivy, but I don’t think our neighbors would appreciate that.

We went with a corded mower (this one). I really like it, but our yard sounds like it’s about half the size of yours. We did have to get a little creative when the lightning temporarily took out both our garage outlets and our back porch outlets.

The thing I like most is that it’s easy to start up. I despised fighting to get my dad’s mower to start. Instant starting also means that there’s no penalty for turning it off to empty the bag more frequently or reposition by rolling over the extension cord.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/07/15/the-killer-robot-she.html