At home with Jackie

Swap rotary blades for rabbits for easy mowing

According to our resident wombats, we don’t have a lawn. The wombats call all grass grown here ‘dinner’. In a normal year, wombats and wallabies keep the grass around our house permanently short, while keeping their keen noses sniffing to see if there may be carrots, too. The wildlife doesn’t eat the weeds, though (if weeds were eaten regularly, they wouldn’t be weeds).

Weeds grow faster than grass, making even regularly grazed grass look messy, but a decade or so of spring and autumn weed decapitation with the help of our lawnmower seems to have finally got our weeds in check. I can’t remember when we last used the lawnmower. It’s hidden under a mass of fruit fly netting somewhere in the shed.

You don’t need wombats to keep your turf short. Ducks and geese graze on grass, too. They also leave slippery droppings all summer, which may bring flies, or leave an unwanted substance on your shoes. Even worse, they freeze in winter, then melt in one horrible display. But your grass will be short.

For years, two guinea pigs that lived in a mobile cage kept the grass in front of our house neat for us, until the guinea pigs took advantage of an after-school play period and scuttled away under the rose bushes. They became feral guinea pigs for a few years, twitching their noses triumphantly at us among the carrots and celery in the vegetable garden. Luckily, both guinea pigs were male, otherwise the valley might now be infested with their progeny.

Our pet rabbit lived mostly indoors. His favourite spots were a human lap or shoulder, or next to the computer on my desk. He would eat grass only if it was pre-warmed and held out to him on a human hand, and he was far too superior to eat any straight from the ground. It’s quite possible that other people’s rabbits may not be so fussy.

I once saw a clever prototype for a rabbit-propelled lawnmower that was invented decades ago by a zoology professor at the Australian National

University (ANU). A long, circular wire cage had a rabbit house inside, suspended to keep it level, even when the cage was moving. As the rabbits pushed their noses at the lusher grass beyond the wire, the cage rolled with them. It was fascinating to watch, and the rabbits seemed to enjoy it, but you can never depend on a rabbit to keep every bit of lawn neat. For a while, the rotary rabbit mowers kept the

ANU lawns short, and gave joy to pet rabbits and onlookers, but the design passed away with its creator. It would be wonderful to see them again.

The easiest non-mowing way to keep grass short these days is to turn your lawn into chook tucker, which the chooks then transform into eggs and manure. Chooks need regular greenery, as well as other food, and letting them eat as much grass as they want gives the yolks a rich yellow colour.

If you just let chooks roam, they’ll eat the entire garden, and scratch it up, too, so confine them to a mobile chook house (there are many designs – prefab or homemade – from simple cages to extravagant chook palaces). Move them in their mobile home once or twice a day, so the droppings don’t build up and the hens always have access to fresh greenery, and ensure they’re safely housed at night.

Mobile chooks are fun and productive, but your lawnmower will sulk, stuck in the shed, unloved, for years to come.

Swap those rotary blades for rabbits (or chooks, ducks or guinea pigs), and your grass can sport that fresh-mown look all the time, says JACKIE FRENCH