Cutting Costs: Putting A New (Old) Spin On Yardwork
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region. Sam Macdonald is a Moncton-based reporter for Huddle.
With the swish of steel on grass, the jungle was tamed outside a Moncton home – and the consequences of New Brunswick’s whopping 8.8 percent inflation rate finally came to roost for a sweaty, sore reporter.
I’d have been pretty incredulous if someone told me, in the thick of the sequence of snowstorms Moncton was buried under in January and February, that I’d be scything the lawn come summer.
However, the price-per-barrel of oil, economic sanctions against Russia for its unprovoked war in Ukraine, and runaway inflation have created some interesting exigencies.
Plus, there’s something to be said for the “bootstraps and elbow-grease” approach to yard work. My Luddite lawn care routine was the last resort, following an exhaustive review of my options.
Used to long summers spent razing my parents’ lawns with a trusty gasoline-powered mower, that was the first place I turned. If gasoline had not skyrocketed to more than $2 per litre, with no relief in sight, that’s where I would have stopped.
Instead, I sought alternatives. My first – and only – misadventure with a sweat-powered reel mower left me wanting to throw the thing into Humphrey’s Brook.
Next, was the electric mower. My electricity bills in this province have always been manageable so I thought it an opportunity to bask in the righteous glow that comes with eschewing fossil fuels and living in the future. What’s not to love?
That was my reasoning, buying a Sun Joe 12-amp, 13-inch, plug-in lawn mower, ratcheting the chassis up to its tallest height, to avoid tangling it in the burgeoning ecosystem forming in the yard.
My expectations were tempered, as I plugged it in, having read reviews, knowing that electric mowers, just like the electric snow blowers the same company manufacturers, would demand patience and don’t work nearly as hard.
That was okay – I needed an excuse to get outside – but five minutes and about 50 square feet of lawn later, with the wafting aroma of an electrical fire, mower blade tangled in three-inch grass and smoke pouring out of that machine’s every opening, my reasoning was thwarted.
So, with great ceremony, I bit the bullet, borrowed a two-generation-old scythe rusting in the garage of a family member, and took a whetstone to it with the vigor of an Ontarian transplant throwing an extra $250,000 on top of their sight-unseen bid for a house in rural Nova Scotia.
The result was immaculate – I’m serious. I’d become death, destroyer of grass.
It was, to put it succinctly, grueling–making muscles I didn’t realize I had sore until they were strained by repetitive torqueing. My wrists and forearms were a little tight for the following two hours and I’ll admit it’s a pain to rake it all up when I’m done.
But all that was collateral once I found that beatific moment where the blade, by means of my own exertion, hits the grass at the perfect angle, resulting in a symmetrical, culled swath of it flying up and back, ready to rake.
“This must have been how the early Acadians felt in the 18th century, dodging New England’s incursions, taming the land, back when Moncton was a cluster of farms,” I marveled, yardwork armament in hand, appearing to my nosy neighbours – who were probably ready to call the Mounties –like a bearded Grim Reaper, sans black robe, exulting in my triumph over nature’s encroachment.
All absurdity aside, I’m not the only one monkeying with my spending habits to keep up with the ballooning cost of living.
According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, retail spending in New Brunswick jumped 2.4 percent from April 2021 to April 2022, with e-commerce retail has dropped over that same period by 21 percent.
Chamber of Commerce for Greater Moncton CEO John Wishart predicts that the rising cost of everything, due to inflation, will eat into consumer spending for the rest of 2022 and that rising gasoline prices may lead to a reversal in that trend, with a rebound in e-commerce and people giving up drives to the store to shop.
StatsCan information released in June also notes that nearly 75 percent of Canadians have changed their spending habits around transportation, housing, food, and clothing to keep pace with rising day-to-day expenses – thanks, inflation!
Almost half of the people surveyed – including yours truly – have been seeking cheaper alternatives to what they’d normally purchase and have also delayed purchases.
With more than a quarter of the people StatsCan surveyed admitting to going into debt and skimming from their savings to deal with the rising costs of pretty much everything, my newfound last-century approach to yard work seems a reasonable adjustment.