Mowing
Why mowing decides your lawn
Mowing is the most frequent of all care measures: thirty, forty, on ambitious lawns more than a hundred cuts a year. No other tool touches your lawn as often as the mower, and that is why none shapes the result as much. Only regular mowing turns a meadow into a dense carpet, because with every cut the grass forms new side shoots. How dense, how green and how healthy this carpet becomes, however, depends on how it is cut, and here the systems differ more fundamentally than most people think.
The cutting principle: tearing or scissoring
All lawn mowers come down to two principles. Rotary mowers and robotic mowers strike: a fast-rotating blade hits the free-standing blade of grass and severs it by force. Reel mowers scissor: a rotating reel guides the grass against a fixed bedknife, and the cut happens between two blades as with scissors.
The difference shows on the blade: the struck blade frays at the cut, the fibres tear, the tips dry out brown and become entry points for fungal diseases. At a 5 cm cutting height this is hardly noticeable. The lower the cut, the larger the share of damaged tips in the visible green, and the greyer the lawn looks a day or two after mowing. The scissored blade, by contrast, has a clean cut that heals quickly and loses hardly any water. That is why golf greens and stadium pitches are mown exclusively with reels.
The three systems honestly compared
| Rotary mower | Robotic mower | Reel mower | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cutting principle | Impact | Impact (small blades, but very frequent) | Scissors |
| Typical cutting heights | approx. 25 to 70 mm | approx. 20 to 60 mm, usually sensible from 30 mm | 4 to 35 mm (low-cut territory) |
| Finish | Neat at normal height, frays when cut low | Evenly short, but without structure or stripes | Clean scissor cut, dense look, classic stripes |
| Effort | Mow actively once a week | Minimal day to day, but installation and maintenance | Regularity needed (2 to 3 times a week) |
| Ideal for | Play areas and utility lawns from 4 cm | Convenient basic care of large areas | Ornamental lawns, low cuts, the perfect finish |
Honestly: who needs what?
We build reel mowers, and still: not every lawn needs a reel. If you keep a play area for children and the dog at 4 to 5 cm, a decent rotary mower will serve you well; at that height the difference in finish is modest, and the rotary mower's robustness against twigs and windfall fruit is a real advantage there. And if what you want above all is not to mow, the robot is the right answer.
The reel mower is the tool for everyone for whom the lawn is a project: if you want to mow below 3 cm, there is simply no alternative, because every rotary cut visibly frays there. If you want the dense, striped finish of an English lawn, there is no way around the scissor cut. And if you value peace and quiet while mowing, a manual reel mower gives you both: no engine, no cable, no battery, just the sound of the reel cutting.
Combining a robot and a reel mower?
A question we are often asked, and the answer is: yes, that works if the cutting heights match. The robot handles the frequency day to day and keeps the area constantly at its height, and the reel mower delivers the finish at regular intervals: the clean cut and the stripes. Important: the reel should only work slightly below the robot's height, otherwise every finishing cut removes too much leaf at once and stresses the lawn. If you want a true low cut below 2 cm, stick to the reel consistently; no robot reaches and holds that level.
Falkenstein Light or Pro?
Our two manual reel mowers share the same workshop production, the hand-ground reel and the contact-free cut, but they are designed for different requirements: the Falkenstein Light (cutting height 15 to 35 mm, best results from 20 mm, 30 kg, 67 clips per metre) covers the usual heights in the home garden and cuts with the same technology and quality as the Pro. The Falkenstein Pro (cutting height 4 to 25 mm, 47 kg, double gear ratio with up to 143 clips per metre) is the tool for true low cuts and maximum precision. The details, including what can and cannot be retrofitted, can be found in the direct comparison and in the Falkenstein FAQ.
The basic rules, whatever mower you use
Do not mow wet grass; the blades tear instead of being cut. Never remove more than a third of the blade length at once; after a growth spurt, better come down to the target height in two stages. On hot summer days stay a little higher, which protects against scorching. And before a renovation, the opposite of the usual habit applies: mow as short as your mower allows so that sand and seed reach the soil.