How Big Would a Lawn Have to Be to Require Perpetual Mowing?

The story of Sisyphus starts out about as unrelatable as possible.

The guy tells on Zeus for absconding with a nymph and is consequently sent to the underworld. He then tricks Thanatos and leaves him chained up, thereby preventing all death. Sisyphus then has his wife desecrate his body, washes downriver to the underworld, and persuades Persephone to let him return among the living to punish his wife for the desecration he ordered. He is finally apprehended by Hermes and taken to Zeus for punishment.

We’ve all been there.

However, his punishment is not being turned into a spider or having his liver eaten by an eagle every day. Instead, Sisyphus must push a massive boulder up a hill, and whenever he almost reaches the summit, the boulder rolls back down, forcing him to start over.

See, that part hits a little bit closer to home.

Some may be saddled with particularly monotonous jobs or the odd frustrating project here or there, but basic chores can feel remarkably Sisyphean for all of us. Every time you eat, you have to do dishes. But at least dishes can be finished. Laundry doesn’t include the clothes you’re wearing while doing them. The next trip to the laundromat is already unavoidably brewing. I tried to protest this one time and now I’m banned from Wishy-Washy.

When it comes to futile chores, the granddaddy of them all has to be, of course, mowing the lawn. Whoever decided that the lion’s share of suburban yards would be populated by grass and then deemed that allowing the grass to grow to its natural height was unseemly deserves a very stern talking to.

Most homeowners can get away with mowing once a week or two, but that’s because most homeowners have average sized yards. However, if we had a gargantuan lawn, mowing at that frequency simply would not cut it. (Heh, lawn humor.) In fact, if we had a lawn big enough, by the time we finished mowing, it’d be ready to be cut again.

But how big is that?

Considerations

Compared to previous hypotheticals, this one is pretty straightforward. All we need to know is:

1. How much height we’re chopping off with each pass
2. How fast the grass grows
3. How much area we can cover in an hour

There were some other factors that were toyed with, but these were left on the cutting room floor. For example, rotating out different mowers would be an obvious thought. However, Sisyphus didn’t get a break, so neither do we. Refueling and maintenance are also obviously a necessity, but we’re going to brush this aside by imagining this process playing out in some sort of KC-10 / Mad Max hybrid that doesn’t lose us any time.

How much height we’re chopping off with each pass

I’m sure there are many out there with very strong opinions on the acceptable maximum and minimum grass height. Furthermore, there are rules of thumb out there, such as not cutting off more than a third of the height at a time. But we’re going to cut our mower a little slack and allow him to wait until the grass reaches maximum acceptable height and chop all the way to the minimum. Here we see the acceptable height range for Kentucky bluegrass is 0.75-3.5 inches, meaning we’ll be cutting 2.75 inches per pass.

How fast the grass grows

This is dependent on about a billion different things, but the average is about 2 to 6 inches per month. We’re going to take the low end estimate here, giving us two inches of growth per month to keep up with. It’s not like we’ll have much time for fertilizing.

How much area we can cover in an hour

We’re going to want to cover as much as possible. The fastest ride-on lawnmower on the market (that I’m aware of) is the Dixie Chopper, known to reach speeds of up to 15 miles per hour. With a 72″ cutting width, in an hour we could cut:

• A strip fifteen miles long and six feet wide
• A circle 778 feet across
• 8.25 football fields

Bringing It All Together

To find our answer, we need look no farther than this simple formula:

Cut Length / Growth Rate * Cut Rate

Plugging in we get:

2.75 Inches / (2 Inches / Month) * ((15 Miles / Hour) * 6 Feet)

Simplifying:

42 days * (475,200 Square Feet / Hour)

And finally, how big would a lawn have to be to require perpetual mowing?

17.2 Square Miles

This is equal to over 11,000 acres, more than 13 times larger than Central Park. It is an area larger than Manila, capital of the Philippines, home to 1.8 million people.

And it could be maintained by one dude mowing every minute of every day like some sort of folk hero.

Sisyphus would be proud.