14 Easy Tips For Great Looking Lawns On Wet Days.

The big difference between running a lawn mowing business verses a shop.

With a shop, if you have to shut the doors for a day, it will affect your income but not your workload. You will not have literally twice the amount of customers the next day. With a lawn care business, you actually do.

If you cannot work on a particular day, you will have twice the amount of work to do the following day. You can get rained off (unlike a cleaning business for example) this makes your business unique, and that is not always a good thing.

Sure it’s better for the turnover but it comes at a cost. Your business needs to be flexible enough to handle the ebbs and flows of the weather.

Mowing lawns on wet days

You are getting ready for another day of mowing lawns, and you look out the window and it’s raining.

You now have a choice.

• Do you go out and work in the rain today?
• Or do you do something else?

The option you choose is going to depend on what kind of schedule you run and whether you have any time available to catch up. This article is going to cover working with small commercial mowers on residential lawns which is my area of expertise.

There are three ways of scheduling to help you avoid having to work on days like this and I will run through them here first. These are all good strategies that I know will work if you are running between 1-5 vehicles in your lawn care business.

Always have Saturday available as your backup day – This is a good option. You will need to have something mentioned about it in your employment agreement. We usually write into our contracts that if the guys are rained off during the week and have not completed their 40 hours, then they need to be available on a Saturday if needed.

There are a couple of downsides to this.

• Some of your workers may play sports or have other commitments on a Saturday so they may be unavailable.
• The other issue is your customer may not appreciate you turning up on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a BBQ to mow their lawn.

Work 10 hour days Mon to Thursday and keep Fridays available – This could be a slightly better plan if you’re like me and don’t like working at the Weekends.

There are definitely some upsides to this.

• You can keep Fridays available for Tree work or gardens and roster the guys for overtime.
• If you are rained off, you now have a Friday available. The kind of work you would have booked for this day can be moved on without too many issues.
• You will be doing high paying work on these days so you will be able to afford it.
• You will be the most popular lawn care owner in town because your guys will always have three day weekends or high pay packets.

In Winter when the days get shorter the grass is growing less and you can get through your work a little bit quicker so this normally works out ok.

The downside is

• A 10 hour workday in the lawn care industry can be hard on everyone.
• Some of our top customers have requested a Friday mow, so the lawn looks good for the weekend. They will have to compromise.

Run your business at 80% capacity – This is the option we eventually settled on. When I employed people, I put them on a 35-hour workweek, and overtime started if they were required to work over 40 hours.

They began at 7.30 am and were back by 2-2.30pm. We also had the Saturday work agreement but we hardly ever used it. When your guys are getting in around 2 pm, it is effortless to keep on top of the workload if it rains or if someone doesn’t turn up.

Is there something else you can do?

If you are a sole proprietorship and you are not running a huge amount of lawns it may not be that much of an issue. Your rainy day list could involve things like.

• Do maintenance or taking gear in to get fixed.
• Having a general cleanup.
• Catching up with your paperwork.
• Working on your website or marketing materials.

There are 101 things that you are going to be doing after-hours anyway so you can simply swap your time around.

What can your crew do?

However, if you run a crew you have to think about them and what they can do. Your options can be to send them out or give them the day off. We have a rule that everyone turns up at 7.30 am regardless of the weather (if there is a real storm we will text them by 6.30 am to let them know not to come in). If the rain is not too heavy the guys will go out as usual, but we have a policy.

If you work in the rain for more than four hours and the rain doesn’t stop, then you can come back to the yard and go home. The time you don’t work will have to be made up later in the week. It hardly ever rained for a full day and if it did then over half a day had already been done, so our catch up time was minimal. We didn’t make a mess as I had had over twenty years of experience at that time so I taught the guys how to do it properly and leave it tidy. I am going to give you all of these now.

If you are going to work in the rain here are 16 tips that will help you.

Use a bar blade with a lift fin

You preferably want a bit of lift on the ends of your blade to throw wet grass into the catcher or mulch it a bit better. There are three different kinds of lift blades — high, medium and low lift. The first blades in the photo are a high lift bar blade. I find these work best for me.  A flat blade will not work well in the wet and neither will a disk (or flower) blade. The High lift blade is better in the wet

The best mower available in New Zealand for a wet cut is the testarossa. These mowers have bar blades and a fan above the blade which throws the grass into a large catcher.

Make sure your blades are sharp

You need to use sharp blades on wet days. I sharpen my blades every 33 mower hours anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to give them a quick sharpen before leaving on a wet day.

Raise your blade

Cut a bit higher than usual. Cutting high will improve the look of the job. You can always take the height down again on your next visit.

Go slower than usual

Sometimes you are going to need to do this. If you are travelling slower with the mower, the engine will not have to work so hard, and it will throw grass into your catcher easier. You can speed back up in areas where the going is a bit easier.

If you step on the grass and the water comes up around your boot it’s too wet – You are going to leave trails so you cannot mow this area. Areas like this are not that common, but if most of the lawn is like this, it may be best to leave it. Now if the customer doesn’t mind wheel marks you could go ahead and mow it high. The wheel marks will disappear over the next week or so.

Use a weed eater on small wet areas

If there is a small area that is spongy and cannot be cut with a lawnmower, then a line trimmer is a good option. A line trimmer is a better choice than leaving the area uncut. You do need to be careful of where you stand when you do this as you will leave footprints so try to keep your foot movement to a minimum.

Have a hover mower as a backup mower

This works better when you are a solo operator. When I mowed lawns from 1987-1999, I was living in a coastal town on a peninsula.

It was wet a lot, and all the lawn care guys had petrol Flymo’s as well as regular lawn mowers. Using a Flymo worked well and enabled us to work on wet lawns or rainy days without any significant issues. One thing that we had to watch out for was our footsteps which could leave muddy footprints.

I had a search around online for petrol powered Flymo’s and I was unable to find any. Possibly they are not making them any more or perhaps not importing them. The only option I could find was a Toro HoverPro but these do seem to be quite pricey. I think I used to pay around $600 for a petrol Flymo.

The secret there was to minimise your steps which I’m glad to say does become easier with practice. Flymo’s are mulch mowers only so if you need to catch you are out of luck there. hey only lasted a year or two and then I had to replace them.

Now having run a lawn mowing business in Hamilton since 2000 I have not had that issue, so I not bought a Flymo since then.

Keep the chute clean

Every time you empty the catcher, turn the mower off (wait for the blade to stop moving) and clean out the chute. Sometimes, if there isn’t too much of a build up, you can clean the chute after every job instead.

Do keep an eye on the chute and don’t let it clog up completely as I have found that once this happens the chute is a lot harder to keep clean for the rest of the day.

Clean under the mower – Flip and clean under the mower. If you are running a four stroke mower (and most of us are) then never tip the mower on its side. The spark plug needs to point towards the sky when cleaning under the mower.

When I am catching, I usually push the mower handle to the ground and weigh it down with a half full catcher. Doing this gives me easy access to the underneath of the mower. I prefer to wear gloves when cleaning under a mower but that is just a personal choice.

Only mow your regular lawns

Do not attack any overgrown lawns on a rainy day. You will just find yourself working harder and making a big mess. Keep to your regular work and only mow lawns that have been cut on a regular basis.

If you are not going to wear rain pants, then cut them into shorts.

Sounds silly but I find I can work harder for longer if I just wear a rain jacket and shorts. Rain pants can be a real pain, and I have yet to find a pair that I don’t overheat in.

The other option of jeans and a rain jacket is even worse. It is incredibly uncomfortable, and you really can feel it dragging on you by the end of the day.

Lately I have been taking a pair of wet weather pants and cutting them into shorts.  This works really well if you’re wearing shorts anyway and it takes a lot longer before you begin to overheat.

You do not get that problem with shorts. I should also mention that I wear waterproof sock protectors, so my feet don’t get wet. Nothing worse than wet feet.

Have two raincoats and rotate them

I actually have a coat hanger in my van where I hang one jacket out to dry while I wear the other one. After a few lawns, I rotate them. If there is a dry spell, I hang it to dry on my side mirror to dry a bit while I mow a lawn.

Start your mower on the grass

Do not start your lawn mower on concrete. That is a terrible idea as it can leave a nasty green ring on a piece of white concrete. These do not wash off easily and can take a few days to disappear — every time your customers see that green ring they will wonder why on earth you started your mower there.

Turn your mower off before running over a path

Remember to turn your mower off before running over paths and driveways. If you have a path separating two pieces of lawn, then do not mow across it every time you pass. Mow one side of the path and then the other. It looks much better than a path with a whole lot of green stripes.

Lift the mower and travel on the back (or front) wheels when moving on paths and driveways

If your back wheels are a mess and your front wheels look clean (or vice versa)  then turn off the mower and lift the back wheels off the ground before heading back to your vehicle. This will avoid you leaving those horrible green wheel marks across your customer’s paths and driveway.

Tap your catcher regularly when you mow the lawn.

When you have finished tap the catcher, so the grass drops back into the catcher instead of falling out in clumps as you push your lawnmower back to your vehicle.

Hopefully, after reading this you will manage a bit better if you have to work in the rain.

As I finish writing this my German Shepherd is looking at me waiting for his walk and ironically, it’s raining.