If you trim every week or even two a lightweight Husqvarna 323 is a dandy. Not quite as powerful as the 4-mix Stihl's. way lighter though. I do quite a bit of trimming. Really like the Redmax trimmers with Gator Magnum line. The line is tough as nails, has an aramid core and is clear. I hate having to pick up bits of red, or yellow line left in the yard. Whatever trimmer you use, get yourself a Husqvarna T-35 head for it. They hold about 30' of .095 line (about double most others) and bump feed exceptionally reliably. Decent dealers even sell the couple parts that wear out very inexpensively. They're only $20 retail and quite a bit less via the bay. Bay ones may not come with the stihl adaptor so make sure before you buy. The non-adaptor ones fit Redmax, Husqvarna, and most Echo stuff as delivered. Several years back I did some volunteer work trimming an old abandoned cemetery. Holy guacamole batman, that's a lot of trimming. Started at 7:30 am, quit at 8 pm. Local church fed us... Twice.
We have 3 weed whackers. A big one that can even cut good sized brush. A smaller Stihl that I will probably be selling and last year Ryobi came out with a 40 volt unit and I bought the first one that Home Cheapo put on the shelf. It works great. Only slightly slower than the Stihl. Battery will last from 45 minutes to an hour and is recharged in an hour. If I do 45 minutes, I don't want any more anyway. This time when I changed the string I put on the heavier string (not round) and it appears to do an even better job.
I have an old (20 years or so is my guess) Weed Eater straight shaft. I don't know how much it weighs, but it's heavy. I picked it up at the end of a driveway about 12 years ago. Put a new fuel line on it and that was all. No shoulder strap came with it, but I turned on my redneck engineering skills and made a strap out of a couple old laptop bag straps I got from our IT guy at work. It ain't pretty, but I didn't want to go overboard on a weed eater than I had less than $3 into. I'd bought my mom a B&D cordless weed whacker 4 or so years ago as she was dead set on doing her own yard work. The next year she decided to hire a lawn service and gave me the cordless. It does a good job on the 'manicured lawn' part, but it doesn't do so well in the ditch. I buzz around the trees in the yard after each mowing, and break out the gasser for the heavy stuff. We've had enough rain this year that the ditch weeds are growing faster than I've ever seen it. I am considering weed whacking the ditch with Roundup after the next mowing.
That ditch has run off somewhere. If it finds its way to water it can be negative for plant and animal life that you may not observe. I used a week killer on my lawn. A few years later I turned the ground for a garden. For the next two years some of my tomatoes were very deformed and died. I had the extension service evaluate the soil and plants. They said it was herbicide lingering in the soil. I call the manufacturer, they denied this being possible. However, there are several articles supporting the extension services position. The other plants didn't seem effected. Here is an alternative : http://m.hometalk.com/#!/1903802/natural-weed-control-that-works. This really does work. I tried it with good results. Some things need to be hit a few times, but at least the ground isn't poisoned.
You guys need to spray more round-up. 15 minutes of weed wacking, max, and I'm on a few acres of land too. I can get close enough with the ZTR to eliminate 90% of the weeds anyway. Just need the whacker to clean up edges along driveways, etc.
I only do the pond mainly.. I spray around all the islands (4 landscaping islands), the house, grage, barn, pool/playground area, and wood/wood she'd area. The front of my property has about 500 ft of split rail fence and I spray a lot around the posts as well. Otherwise I would have like 3-4 hours.. Lots of weed killer.. Lots and lots, in a 4 gallon Husqvarna backpack sprayer.
My ditch runs about 500 feet east to a hayfield, where the land starts to go uphill. The only part I can't mow with the tractor is the east 30 feet or so. It's too steep to mow without flipping over. The nearest body of water is 3 miles away. Just down the road from me I see tractors every spring towing manure spreaders that are flinging poo 10 feet in the air behind them on 80 acre plots. Then they spray Lord knows what before they plant their GMO seeds. I'm pretty sure three ounces of Roundup and a gallon of water in my pump sprayer is akin to me spitting in a pond.
I don't blame you a bit for wanting to cut down on weed whacking. And you are so right about others doing far far worse with overhead spraying, and who know what outcome from GMO seeds. I was exposed to agent orange while in Vietnam. Now many of us have problems related to that event that was over 40 years ago.
A while ago, Backwoods Savage directed me towards a 40V Ryobi. That's what the wife currently uses, and it's da' chit! Dennis, thanks again. JB
I'm sorry to hear that you were exposed to that nasty stuff. I've met a few people that are dealing with the effects of agent orange to this day. The whole runoff/pollution thing is one of the reasons that I gave up fertilizing my lawn a few years back. That, and it was expensive. The only results I noticed was having to mow more often. Now I just leave the clippings on the lawn and spot spray weeds as I get around to it. My lawn actually looks better now that I have the weeds under control. Once the weeds were thinned out, the grass filled in and it stays green as long as nature sends rain. As I left for work this morning there was a county tractor around the corner that was mowing the ditches and sides of the road. They usually scalp it pretty low when they come by. I had to weed whack along the road west of my driveway last week (in front of the orchard) as the weeds were getting so tall I was having a hard time seeing traffic when pulling out of my driveway. I'm hoping they hang a right and mow that down as well as the ditch in front of my house.
I've got the Redmax G20LS at 9.5 lbs. Its got plenty of power for its size, I run the big line in it.
Red max are some nice units for homeowners. I use a echo srm210 with a straight shaft for my park as Pete would say. The mow crews at the landscape company I'm employed by use stihl fs90's. For the manicured lawns they do the stihl has way to much power. Newbs always tearing up fences and stripping bark from trees. Personally I would never even think about any string trimmer without a combustion chamber.
It is always better to NOT SPRAY whenever possible. Roundup works and is used a lot but it is also used way too much. Sure, they claim it is the safest spray out there and the safest ever. I remember when the miracle spray was DDT and they encourages its use only to find out many years later that it did indeed have lots of bad points and was taken from the market. So I always tend to shy away from it as much as possible. Growing crops and spraying is much different than just spraying weeds or grass.
I have Honey Bees.... All i can say is.... All sprays are bad. Reminds me... Ive got an atv spray tank that has a boomless back sprayer and hand wand. I only used it one season... Worked great. Ill have to take a pick and put it up for sale !
An atv spray tank that straps on the back? Has me a bit confused. I also am thinking about selling my Stihl backpack sprayer. My shoulders are bad and just keeping it pumped up is a problem. I will get a tank for the atv and that will be nice especially when we spray fruit trees but also great for in the fields. Still, we use very little spray but sometimes it is needed.
