Meet Psycho
A month past the shortest day, and Spring is almost sprung. After a very dark July, which saw our little EV doing sterling work topping up our hose solar system batteries we’ve had a great August. Quite warm, and lots of sunny days. And our lawns are growing. We don’t have a huge area. but with Sails Ashore. my late mothers home next door as well as Kowhai Lane we’ve a fair amount of lawns to mow. none of them big, but lots of small convoluted areas.
Pressure from Iris
For some time Iris has been muttering about a robotic lawn mower …. we have a robotic vacuum cleaner and a robotic mop, and she loves them. They save her heaps of time and effort, and do a pretty good job. I wasn’t that enthused about a robotic mower as up to recently they all seemed to need a perimeter wire…. and they mow on a random pattern. There’d be a huge amount of work laying all that boundary wire, and our small complex layouts would present all sorts of issues. But now there are machines that don’t use a boundary wire. The magic of GPS !!
The trick with robotic mowers is mow every day, or at most every second day when lawns are growing. That way they take a tiny bit off the top, which is easily mulched…. so for us a slight down side is no lawn clippings for the compost bins, but the upside is a continuous application clippings which are so small as to be invisible great feed for the lawn.
Lawns are seldom at their best in winter, but these are the best ours have ever looked
We love it. No more 3 or 4 hours a week mowing lawns, which looked great for a few days, and then as they grew looked less and less attractive. Now, mowed every day or second day they look great, all the time
Which sort to buy, and would they work for us
So I relented…. you don’t get shot for at least enquiring… and spent a fair amount of time on the internet sussing out the several different brands available in NZ. Lots of videos, and all pretty positive as well. So then it was onto the phone, and contact all the various agents and sellers and then carefully explain the issues I could see us having. Small lawns, very convoluted layouts and a wet climate. All the various offerings had features unique to each of them which I really liked. But ultimately I decided to go with Segway, and basically because it seemed to be pretty good, but particularly because Phillip, the fellow I dealt with went to great lengths to analyse my requirements and come up with solutions. For example I’d thought that having one bigger (and more expensive) machine and shifting it between Sails Ashore and Kowhai Lane might make good sense…… my Scottish & Dutch heritage is pretty strong in some fields. Phil convinced me to look at two smaller machines, which was actually slightly less expensive than a single bigger machine. His reasoning was shifting one machine between 2 locations would rapidly become a pain, and actually quite difficult to get them to work properly.
Trial
And Phil sent us down a trial machine to make sure it would do what he said it would. Took me a couple of days to get the placing of the various components sorted. The poor machine was quite confused, as with poor aerial placement it wasn’t properly seeing the satellites. But once I had the aerial sited up on our roof, with a good view of the satellites it hasn’t looked back
Psycho
The apps that control each of our 3 robots has the ability to name the machine. the vacuum cleaner is “Dobbie”, the robotic mop is “Mrs Mopp” and Psycho is our lawn mower. Why Psycho ?? When I was at secondary school a fellow had the contract to mow all the various school lawns. He had a small tractor and a whacking great gang mower, and he mowed at speed…. playing fields, shoes, socks, lunch boxes, cricket gear…. everything got mowed. He was known far and wide as Psycho and several times at assembly our head master would warn us to keep the playing fields clear of gear, as Psycho was coming.
We’ll get a mower for Kowhai Lane, and it will be named “Okie” after the local mower of the village lawns and playing fields.
I arrived on Stewart Island in 1969 as Forest Ranger. Since then I've fished commercially both in Fiordland and around Stewart Island then skippered our charter yacht in the same waters, and also down into the Southern Ocean. More recently we now have "Sails Ashore" B&B, and I also guide our guests and others on Ulva Island, introducing them to the natural world of Stewart island