Installing a new lawnmower blade after the old one gets worn out and dinged will make cutting your grass easier, I’ve discovered.  Also…common lawn grass has the ability to wear down steel.

I have an electric lawnmower.  It would hardly do for most suburban lawns but it feels a tad extravagant for the one in the back of my little brick rowhouse.  But two years of trying to cut grass with a basic pushmower sold me on a power one.  Now I just run the mower back and forth over my little patch of grass a few times and I’m done, all but the trimming which I do with my electric weed whacker.   Spring is here in Baltimore now, and the grass in my back yard has already needed mowing once.  But when I got the mower out this year, it seemed unduly sluggish.  I could hear the motor bogging down on grass it shouldn’t have had to work at cutting.  So I stopped, unplugged, and took a look at the blade and was just amazed…I had no idea grass can make steel dull like that in just four years.  Well…I dinged the blade once also, when I pushed the mower too close to the sewer tap that sticks out of the ground in my back yard near the alley, just far enough that a couple weeks worth of grass growth hides it almost completely from view.  I should plant flowers around it or something.  But I swear just cutting the frigging grass for four summers made the rest of the blade about as dull as the edge of a quarter. 

So I went looking around for a new one and none of the local hardware stores carried that particular blade, including the store I bought the mower from.  I guess I’m supposed to buy a whole new lawnmower when the blade wears out.  I ended up googling the part number and finding new blades on, of all places, Amazon.Com.  Somehow buying lawnmower parts where I buy my books doesn’t quite compute.