Tales from Titchmarsh

Alan ponders new technology in the garden and feels excited by the promise of a lawncare revolution powered by batteries...

Alan contemplates new technology and battery-operated lawnmowers

There is a temptation, as one grows older, to become resistant to change; to think that the way we do certain tasks has suited us fine for umpteen years and therefore it will continue to keep us happy in the future, thank you very much. Sometimes it is wise to have reservations about new inventions that arrive with a fanfare. For when the novelty wears off and reality bites, they can disappear as quickly as they arrived, or else gather dust in the potting shed to prove that we didn’t really need them anyway. The simplicity of a spade and a fork, a rake and a hoe will, one hopes, assure them of immortality. Their very designs – easy to use, efficient, silent and needing only minimum maintenance – endear them to most gardeners. And yet there is one area where I suspect we are about to undergo a dramatic change, and that’s power tools. I have long bemoaned the level of noise that mowers and strimmers and chainsaws produce, along with the deleterious effect of petrol fumes on the environment. I have refrained from using power tools on Sundays for as long as I can remember, believing that there should be at least one day in the week when the hills are not alive with the sound of two-stroke. However regularly one services one’s petrol mower, it will always pump out exhaust fumes – which are at best unpleasant and at worst downright unhealthy – all to the accompaniment of that wearisome droning noise. If you opt for an electrically powered mower, you will escape the fumes, but the machines do seem to have an uncanny ability to run over their own cables. Enter the lithium – or Li-ion – battery. To some of us the very name will be setting off warning bells. Aren’t they the ones that can catch fire or melt mobile phones and laptops I hear you ask? The same batteries that in our phones run down as fast as you can look at them? Yes, and in the early days of their development they were variable in both efficiency and safety. But technology progresses quickly – and manufacturers are now offering safer, more reliable Li-ion batteries, so, in the gardening world at least, they are making significant inroads into the power tool market. My local supplier tells me that over the past couple of years, garden tools powered by these batteries have started to outsell those powered by petrol. Time was when the length of a rechargeable battery’s life precluded its popularity in garden power tools. And folk worried a battery-powered device wouldn’t be as powerful – fine, perhaps, for a little light tinkering but for serious work you’d need the brute force of petrol power. But things have moved on apace. There are also economic advantages to switching to batteries. The running cost of a mower powered by petrol is substantially higher than the cost of re-charging a Li-ion battery, which is just a few pence. There are so many positives to such a system that I feel in danger of sounding like an advertisement. So, do I have a Li-ion batterypowered mower? No, not yet… But I cannot see how, in all conscience, I can replace my ageing two-stroke mower with another one of the same design, when I could have a quieter, more economical and more environmentally-friendly mower instead. All this talk of new technologies has made me ponder what other tasks I could be modernising, if only I were more open to change... Perhaps my seed-sowing technique could be evolved, or the way I plant could be done differently? Thankfully, the fundamentals of how we garden have changed little since the time of Adam. But I still won’t cut my grass on a Sunday even with a quieter mower, though, to be honest, that might be more out of habit than to keep the neighbours happy.

I refrain from using power tools on Sundays... believing there should be at least one day in the week when the hills are not alive with the sound of twostroke