Best way to cut fallen grass?

[Cisco Kid]

I have moved into a previously owned house. The yard is very nice, but the last owner has not cut the grass frequently and now it is nine to ten inches long and fallen over. This makes it impossible to mow normally.

New grass is coming up under, and the fallen grass is still attached (it cannot be raked away).

Years ago I was able to rent a special mower that looked a bit like a roto tiller but with a horizontal hay mowing blade of about a foot across. No one in my community has one to rent.

I was told the best thing to use might be a brush cutter....a weed wacker with a blade attached instead of cutting line. I guess I will rent this and go at it.

I used a hedge trimmer on a small bit and it worked well, but it is too small to use on the whole lawn.

Thanks for any ideas.

[cynthia_h]

How much area are you dealing with?

I have some native grasses which got ahead of me the last two weeks (I usually weed them out, but didn't want to step into the muddy bog and compact my soil that much) due to heavy rains. Over the Valentine's Day weekend, they fell over. Just yesterday, I snapped foxtail heads off of one plant.

Which means they MUST go. I have a sickle. But I'm only dealing with a small patch, approx. 8' x 12', and another area of fallen-over clumpy grasses under the redwood tree, maybe 10' x 10' with random clumps elsewhere.

So a total of approx. 200 sq.ft. (20 sq.meters). A sickle will be OK, and I'll have grass clippings, for the first and probably only time, for my compost bin. (So long as there aren't any more foxtails in them.)

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

[applestar]

Collect the foxtail seedhead first, then sickle cut the grass. Why waste the compost ingredient and let the weeds win?
When I opened this thread, I thought you were going to say goats, cynthia.

[cynthia_h]

I actually haven't seen any language in the goat websites discussing fresh grass! Brush control, dried plants, dried grasses, dried weeds, fire-danger type stuff (i.e., dried whatever). But not fallen-over green grass. They'd probably think it was dessert or something, though....

If you *do* have a very large area, Cisco, see whether the services of goats can be rented in your region. But be sure to protect roses and other valued plants; a friend of my husband's found out the hard way...his roses were pruned out of season and down to nubs! But the weeds were gone, too.

Cynthia