By Malcolm Christiansen

Last week I introduced the Internet to some of the targets of a landscaping laborer’s mangling ministrations, and in this Saturday edition of LAWN TERROR I’ll be taking you through some of our equally clumsy and imprecise devices for getting the job done!

Well, apart from mulching plugs, the use of which essentially amounts to buttfucking your lawnmower without lube.

A WARNING: The sheer variety and lethality of the landscaper’s arsenal may stagger and befuddle the uninformed, but know this: Mother Nature would like nothing more than to see clean, hard-working human men and women such as yourselves forced out of their home and jobs by unhealthy floral elements. Lawn-care professionals need nothing less than the most up-to-date array of tools in order to stem the unending tide of leafy intrusions springing from Gaia’s viridian vagina.

CHAPTER TWO: YOUR WEAPONS

LAWNMOWERS

Ask any landscaper which machine he uses most often, he’ll invariably respond by saying “my lawnmower.” It is incredibly important that you flee the conversation at this point, because if you don’t then with his next breath the landscaper will begin listing all the things wrong with his piece-of-shit lawnmower. And believe me, there will be something wrong with it. No gas-powered lawnmower manufactured in the past fifty years has performed to its owner’s satisfaction; maybe it’s too heavy, maybe it doesn’t bag properly, or maybe it’s too slow. Maybe the tires are bare. Maybe it gets terrible gas mileage.

Or maybe it has a handle set-up that was designed by retards for aliens where, in order to keep the blade lowered while engaging the engine, you must crush your thumb between two steel handles every FUCKING time you mow some old motherfucker’s goddamn lawn.

Honda to Rest Of Planet: "Lick our taints."

Seriously, how do you fuck up a lawnmower handle this badly? Put the fucking blade control on TOP of the main bar and the fucking engine control on the BOTTOM of the main bar, and then nobody has to mangle their fucking hands trying to operate one of your shitty thousand-dollar-a-pop mowers-

Hey! Wait a minute! Where’s everybody going?

WEED TRIMMERS

Uneducated louts might tell you that weed trimmers are typically used for precision cutting in areas lawnmowers can’t reach, but they are lying. The true purpose of a weed trimmer is to launch pebbles into your co-workers’ faces at speeds approaching seventy miles an hour, and anyone who says differently has obviously never finished a workday with half a gravel pit embedded in one cheek.

SPREADERS

Fly spreaders (such as the one above) are actually pretty unobjectionable tools. You pour some powdery shit in the top, you push it, and then that same powdery shit comes flying out the bottom at high speed. There’s very little to fuck up.

Drop spreaders, on the other hand, have much more personality. See, you only use drop spreaders when the powdery shit you’re spreading is powdery shit that you very much don’t want to be breathing, such as iron phosphate (a common mosskiller.)

Cheeky little bastard.

Drop spreaders work fine in theory, at least until you’ve been using them for thirty seconds and some little piece of grit in the teeth makes it stop working. Intelligent landscapers will solve this problem by fiddling with the opening mechanism, eventually dislodging the grit. Unintelligent landscapers will thump the spreader against the ground several times, sending clouds of iron phosphate in the air like some sort of noxious fireworks display. Guess what kind of landscaper I am.

(It’s important to note that iron phosphate isn’t actually poisonous; believe me, if it were I wouldn’t be typing this right now. It basically dries out your skin something fierce and makes everything taste like nails for a while.)

AERATORS

Aerators are perhaps the best argument that landscaping is less about beautifying unkempt yards and more about fucking up Mother Nature no matter the cost. See, aerators drive large hollow spikes into the ground over and over, depositing the retrieved earth onto lawns in convenient little turd-shaped cylinders. If there were a weapon like that, it would be banned by international treaty in seconds.

There are also hand-powered aerators, like this one, for when your lawn has really pissed you off and you want to make it suffer.

What’s more, there are people who claim that aerating is good for lawns. That is how much people hate nature; when shown an implement that can stab a lawn hundreds and hundreds of times, these people will say “Yep. Musta had it coming.”

DE-THATCHERS

In the same way that insult typically follows injury, dethatching typically follows aerating. A dethatcher is basically a cylinder covered in long hooks that reach down and tear up all the dead moss and grass that accumulates on a lawn over the year, while also breaking up the little dirt dog-turds left behind by the aerator. To further illustrate that, imagine being stabbed a dozen times and then having someone wax your chest.

HAND TOOLS

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a picture of a double-bladed axe that isn't from World of Warcraft or that isn't covered in fakey dwarven runes or some shit? FUCKING NERDS

Apart from wimpy little weeding implements, hand tools are fucking boss. I dare you to prune a blackberry bush down to nothing with a pair of lopping shears, chop down a cherry tree with a hacksaw, or even just dig a bigass hole with a spade without feeling like a big tough man afterward. Granted, you’ll likely be a big tough man with severe muscle fatigue covered in various cuts and bruises, but if you wanted to live a painless life free of open wounds you shouldn’t have become a lawncare professional, jerkass.

Tune in next time for the third and final installment of LAWNTERROR: CHAPTER 3: TROUBLESHOOTING.