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Use a Robomower or Lawnbott on your lawn – free up your time

by Tricia

Summer is here and the weekends are for having fun, going to the cottage, beach, sporting events, visiting friends or just plain relaxing. If cutting the lawn is a chore that you’d rather not do why don’t you get a Robomower?

I was asked to do a short write up about Bamabots.com – Robomower and Lawnbott #1 Dealer – and to tell you the truth, once I started reading about these amazing machines I was hooked. I love the idea of Robotic lawn mowers.

We have such a small lawn that it really wouldn’t be practical to get a Robomower. I mean our backyard is 17 feet wide by approximately 30 feet long, but the perimeters have raised garden beds that are 3 and 4 feet wide, and then there’s a 20′ x 20′ patio area, so you can imagine how little lawn is left.

Now if I were back at my parents house with their good sized yard that probably took at least 45 minutes to an hour to cut both the front and back lawns a Robomower starts to sound like a good idea.

The Bamabots site has a top ten list of reasons why owning a Robomower or Lawnbott is a good idea. As an ER nurse I truly appreciate #8 on the list “They are safe. In 2005 there were 72,000 emergency room visits involving lawn mowers. ZERO involving robotic lawn mowers.“. Now that’s got me thinking. My elderly neighbor always pulls out her electric lawn mower while keeping an eye on our windows. I swear she does this on purpose. She then proceeds to begin cutting her lawn while in bare feet. Of course this brings me running outside. I’m certain she does this on purpose. If anyone in my neighborhood needs a robotic lawn mower – she does!

Other nifty tidbits on the top ten list that caught my eye was the fact that all of the Robomower and Lawnbott parts are replaceable, plus they really never wear out since there’s no motor to break down it’s said that they could last for decades. All you really need to do is change the blades once a year and replace the batteries when they no longer hold enough of a charge to cut your lawn.

Many of my recent posts have been about going green and doing our part to lower our carbon footprint. Well you could consider the robomowers “green” as they don’t use gas or oil so they do not contribute to pollution. I didn’t know this but 5% of pollution is caused by lawn mowers!

The best reason to get a Lawnbott or Robomower is because it will free up your time. Since the robotic lawn mowers can mow autonomously without human help all season long you could literally go away for the weekend or go about your business and your lawn will get cut on it’s own. These mowers actually go out on their own, mow your yard and then head back home to their charger. They’ll do this repeatedly throughout the season without any help from you.

professional175.gif Bamabots.com sells many different models of Robomowers and Lawnbotts. Each have different mowing capacities. The RL850 model that I’m showing to the left are great for lots that are up to 3/4 of an acre, where as the Robomower RL1000 is perfect for yards that are up to an acre in size.

Speaking of the RL1000 there’s a Robomower review that discusses all the features of this model in full detail.

rl1000-176.gifIf I were thinking of buying a Lawnbott or Robomower I think I’d take a serious look at the RL1000 since it is one of the models that has the autonomous feature where it can be programed in advance and cut your yard and returning to it’s charger on it’s own.

It just so happens that both of these mowers are on sale right now.

Just like any other type of lawn mower these are not inexpensive but when you consider what you’ll save on fuel and or electricity, plus gain in free time I think the price becomes comparable to a good regular lawn mower.

Have you ever seen a robotic lawn mower in action? I haven’t, but I’d like to as I’m sure it would be kind of cool to see.

Oh if you visit the site you must check out The Garden Groom – a hedge trimmer that self cleans, and the Electronic Venus Flytrap that burps when it catches a fly. Both items are near the bottom of the main page.






Filed Under: Garden Buzz, Garden Maintenance, Garden Tools, Great Sites, Home and Garden, Home and Lifestyle, Lawn Care, Living Green, Shopping Tagged With: autonomous, backyard, bamabots.com, blades, cutting, deal, electricity, electronic venus flytrap, features, free up time, garden, Garden Groomer, green, home, lawn, lawn mower, lawnbott, Living Green, price, programable, replaceable parts, robomower, robotic lawn mower, sale, save time, self cleaning hedge trimmer, summer, works on own

The big rat

by Tricia

You know what? I completely lost track of time over the last couple of days. I haven’t been feeling well again so I ended up spending the last few days pretty much lying around. I thought yesterday was Tuesday that’s how much time I ended up losing track of. It’s amazing to me that it’s Thursday already.

I guess it doesn’t help that I did something to hurt my foot on Sunday so I’ve been limping around. I’m a klutz so it’s not unusually for me to trip and hurt my ankle or foot, bang my knee or stub a toe, but this time round I have no idea what I did. I’ve been klutz free to the best of my knowledge!

Ok so now that you know why I haven’t posted for a few days I’d like to know what you know about RATS.

On Sunday my husband and I were in the kitchen putting a special tinted film on our window – which I’ll tell you about in another post in a few moments – and we both happened to gaze out at the garden at the same time and we saw a big rat beside our chiminea.

We’ve seen mice and rats in the yard before. I don’t think any of them live in our yard. One of our neighbors has a garage and shed in the backyard that touches our yard and I think the mice and rats might live in there. The neighbor on the other side also has an area that I’ve seen mice come from before. I’m not saying that there’s no possibility that the rats lives on our property but we don’t have as many nice hiding places as our neighbors do.

So how do I get rid of it?

I’m not big on killing animals. I don’t however want a rat population to continue to grow near my home.

What should we do?

Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, pests, Pets and Wildlife, The neighborhood Tagged With: animal, ankle, backyard, foot, garage, garden, home, klutz, limp, lost days, neighbor, neighbors, rat, shed, sick, window

Landscaping adds value to your home and gives you extra living space

by Tricia

I’ve noticed lately that the value of homes in our area has been going up and up. We’ve only lived in our house for six years and already and going by the price similar homes in our area have sold for, our house has gone up in price by more than $250,000 making homes in our area $450K +.

Don’t be fooled. There’s nothing particularly special about the homes in our area. It’s a nice neighborhood, but it’s not a gated community or anything. Housing prices have just been going up.

The odd thing is, I find many of the homes rather plain Jane. For all I know they’ve been gutted and completely renovated inside, but from the outside they don’t look like anything special.

That’s where we are different. We are renovating the inside of our home, but we began our indoor renovations at the same time as our outdoor landscaping. Luckily we finished the outdoor landscaping the same year we started. The indoor renovations are ongoing much to my dismay.

We have no plans to sell our home, but I’ve always figured that all the work we’ve done landscaping our yard and caring for our lovely garden has added value to our home.

My suspicions were confirmed when I read an article on Plant-Care.com that states that a study cited in Smart Money magazine states that consumers value a landscaped home up to 11.3% higher than it’s base price. I’m pleased with that report since our home is the only one on the whole block that really has any landscaping. We’ve added value to our home. It’s confirmed!

The article that I found that information in was one that discussed a number of unique backyard landscape ideas. If you’ve considered landscaping your front and or backyard and would like some great ideas you should go read the article. There are links within the article that lead to other articles with more in depth information about each particular type of landscaping discussed within the main article.

We don’t have a pool and we never will because our backyard is just too small to have a pool, but if you’ve thought of putting a pool in your yard or perhaps have one, but haven’t done much else to the yard you should read the section on pool and landscaping around the pool area. Certainly if you’ve watched any of the programs on TLC you know that you can landscape a pool area in many different styles and your yard could go from a recreation area to a true living area with a little landscaping.

As many of you know our landscaped backyard includes raised garden beds along the perimeter of the yard and a lovely patio for entertaining. There are some great deck and patio landscaping ideas discussed in the above mentioned article. If you’ve thought of putting in a patio or deck, but you aren’t sure where to start or what materials to use you’ll get some great starter suggestions by reading the articles linked to the landscaping write up.

Some simple, and economical ways to landscape your yard, whether you already have a fully landscaped backyard or just a flowerbed or two is to add some garden lighting. Outdoor lighting, electric or solar, can be used to light a garden path or highlight plants or other features with a garden or backyard. We use solar outdoor lighting and it makes our yard look quite lovely at night. It also makes it pleasant to sit outdoors in the evening in the dimly lit garden.

We used interlocking easy stone to create our raised garden beds, but we could have used layered rocks, or we could have brought in some larger rocks and made landscape features out of them. The above mentioned article discusses the use of rocks in the landscape and how to create a natural look using rocks.

One thing that my husband in particular wants to add to our garden is landscape speakers. There are some speakers that are made to look like rocks that you can place within your garden and hook up to your indoor stereo system which would allow you to have music in your yard yet maintain a natural look and feel. I’m pretty sure that, that is one of the ideas that we’ll use ourselves that’s mentioned in the landscaping article.

I’ve actually visited the Plant-care.com website several times in the past when I’ve been looking up plant care information. I know I visited this site when I was looking up information on Aglaonemas – Chinese evergreens a couple of years ago. They had several articles about these easy to care for plants so they kept coming up in my Google searches. I actually think that’s how I discovered the site in the first place.

To close this long post I’d just like to get back to my original idea. if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know I get quite a bit of pleasure out of my landscaped backyard. I love it and visitors adore it. If you haven’t yet landscaped I would strongly encourage you to do so. You’ll get extra living space that I’m certain you’ll enjoy and it appears you’ll also increase the value of your home.

Take a look at the landscaping article. I’m sure you’ll get some great ideas for your own backyard landscaping.

Filed Under: Garden Decor, Garden Maintenance, Garden Tips, Great Sites, Home and Lifestyle, Landscaping, Renovating and DIY Tagged With: articles, backyard, deck, evergreen, features, flower, garden, garden beds, gardening, House, increase value of home, information, landscape, landscape features, landscape lighting, landscape rocks, Landscaping, landscaping ideas, landscaping increases home value, light, natural landscaping, outdoor, outdoor landscaping, outdoor lighting, outdoors, patio, plant, plant care.com, plants, pool, pool landscaping, solar lighting, unique, unique landscaping ideas, value of home

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