Kikuyu grass and hand mowers

[ted]

Does anybody know why kikuyu grass suddenly becomes infernally tough to cut with a hand mower for a month around autumn and then suddenly caves in and cuts like butter again for the rest of the year ? I've always used a hand mower and I have noticed this for twenty-five years now but have never known why it happens.  I used to just bullock my way through it but when it goes tough now I just raise the setting until the grass collapses again.

[m1469]

Well, Ted,  I don't know.  But I became curious after you posted this thread so I looked around the web a bit and I have decided it has something to do with the starch levels within the grass in relation to climate.  How does this sound to you?

m1469

[ted]

Thanks for looking that up, m1469, I shall search the net myself when I get a spare minute.

Kikuyu grass was extensively planted in suburban Auckland lawns in the fifties, largely because it stays comparatively thick and green even in our summer. Most people then found the problem I spoke of and bought motor mowers. I have never owned a motor mower - smelly, noisy, expensive and dangerous. There are also the fitness, therapeutic and meditative aspects of hand mowers, but everyone neglects these.

What is remarkable is the rapidity with which the grass changes from one state to the other. I can be mowing away quite happily one week in February, then the very next week it feels like wire tying the mower in knots. Come April or May (this weekend actually - that's what put the question into my head) the trouble suddenly vanishes and the lawn reverts to a soft green carpet for another nine months.

Starch levels - seems plausible.