This article explains how you can cut your grass to get a fancy pattern as done in major league baseball. Will they allow ads on the fields? No says a baseball authority. If you wanted to find out how to have a neat design, this might get you started. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/stories/2001-06-27-ballpark-designs.htm
You can do it without the roller if you just cut the exact same pattern every time with a pushmower. It just takes a little longer to become as vivid. I used to double cut people's yards and gave them the option of how they wanted the stripes to appear. Golf course mowers have rollers on the front and back of the reels, so they can do it a little more quickly.
It isn't as artistic as you would imagine. It is mostly technical, a PITA, and a giant time suck. Ballparks have the money and the massive grounds crews to do it. The golf course I used to work at started doing it when it went from ground driven reel mowers to hydraulic reel mowers. Tripling the time it takes to mow each fairway when golfers are coming off the tees at 7 a.m. went from racing to stay ahead of them to praying one of the idiots didn't kill you. Just because they demanded all these patterns in fairways, didn't mean they funded the extra manpower, bought any extra machinery to double or triple up mowing, didn't bitch to high heavens if you dared mow while they were on the hole, and didn't stop hitting their balls straight into your path to force you off the hole. Mowing fairways went from a 3 hour job to you had to hump and catch some breaks to finish in a day.
I understand but this particular issue is a bit of a sore spot for me. I didn't mind doing it when mowing people's yards because you could still be efficient. Golf courses, like public works departments in most places, are really good about dreaming up stuff like this only to refuse to pony up the extra money for the extra work involved with it.
Ok, but when I was in my teens and in college, I made major bank mowing grass/landscaping for both a job and as a side job. Quarterish acre lots are fetching $100 minimum in our area.
That was a slick idea. When I was in college, I did not think of that idea. But working at a gas station gave me some income. My college era was in 1957 so seems things were much different.
Yeah by quite a bit. I am guessing in 1957 lawn mowers were mostly the reel push mowers with no motors. Screw that.
My first power mower was bought by me around 1965. But i had then recently bought my first home. As a child, there were lawns that simply were to dense or high for me to push the reel mower through. So i got the idea to rent the mower to people whose lawns needed cut and let them do the work. My fee was the rental of the mower.
