Grass Labyrinth

I’ve been cleaning up several acres of old hilly pasture overgrown with tall grass, and decided to set aside a relatively flat chunk of it to try making some sort of labyrinth.

I figured that if it didn’t work out, I could always just mow it normally. But it turned out to be even faster and easier than anticipated.

I didn’t really have a plan other than that I wanted to have a single path that went completely through, with an exit instead of dead-ending at a central destination.

I used a DR FB26E field and brush mower as the first pass. It’s heavy and can be kind of awkward to manipulate around tight corners, but I’ve been using it for a few months now to cut the rest of the field, and it can at least actually cut the dense clumps without getting too bogged down. The catch is that going straight through the really thick stuff uses up the battery a lot faster than when I’m just working along the edge of the tall grass a bit at a time.

Over two days I roughed-in the path, making a couple passes to widen it. My “design” was to put the entrance and exit next to each other in the middle of the wall next to the driveway, and then just wind around somewhat randomly. I did most of the layout on the fly, only planning ahead enough to make sure I wouldn’t get stuck with no way to continue. I worked on the path from both ends, and then joined them in the middle.

I measured it at just over 1/2 mile, which was even more than I was expecting – though it does take up quite a lot of space. At a normal walking pace it takes me 11-12 minutes.

The DR mower doesn’t cut very low, and there were some spots where tall grass was hanging over into the path. There are also pre-existing deer trails crossing through the area. When I had someone else try to walk it, they did end up going through a wall when the path was not obvious enough.

So I took anther day to go through it a few more times with an EGO 21” mower set at a low height, with extra emphasis on the U-turns and other areas where the path was a bit hard to see. I found that it took all three of my batteries (5Ah, 10Ah, and 12Ah) to cut the entire path, but it did at least complete the job in one session.

That ended up making it much easier to follow, especially right now when the path is full of dried clippings instead of growing green grass.