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alphabravo83

Difficulty Cutting Dormant Lawn

AlphaBravo83
10 years ago

Hello -- I am in the process of cutting away the top-growth of my dormant bermuda grass to bring it down to a 7/8" height (from about 1.5 inches). I say "in the process" because it's proving to be a difficult endeavor. My mower is a 7-blade Mclane, and it is having a terrible time cutting through the material. Every few feet, it jams on a clump of grass, requiring me to clear it. During last year's green season, it had no difficulty giving a clean cut, so I imagine this has something to do with the thickness/hardness of the dormant stems.

The only way I've been able to remotely get through it has been to cut a wheel-width strip at a time, but this is taking forever with a 10,000 sqft lawn.

Things I've tried:
- Give the blades a thorough sharpening so it'll cut paper
- Run over the lawn once with my rotary mower on its lowest setting, which only brought it down to about 1.25"
- From there, start with a 1" setting on the reel mower, which helps a little, but still gets jammed

I'm wondering if I'm using the wrong technique, or even the wrong equipment to begin with. At this rate, I am not looking forward to doing this every spring.

What have you folks done to accomplish this?

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