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Looks really nice. I didn't realize some of these things use string trimmers...

The object avoidance in the marketing looks pretty solid, though I guess you need to stake around flowers so they don't get ground up.

If I'm not mistaken, acre a day means you could conceivably map out 7 acres of property and have it do a different one each day (?)

For me it seems perfect with one exception: I wish it would bag the grass and carry it to a designated dumping location.

@cjd re flowers: you drive it around to define the cutting zone. After a cutting zone is defined, you can drive it around areas within the cutting zone to set "no-go zones" that it paths around during the cut.

No matter what you're still going to be string trimming, but I'd rather do 90m of string trimming than 4 hours on a mower deck AND 90m of string trimming.

Oh yeah, I never expected not to do a little weed whacking as well...

Like I said, the only real down-side is that it doesn't collect the grass and put it somewhere, also I wonder what it does what it drives under an apple tree with dropped apples...

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@cjd > dropped apples

It has a front bumper just a robotic vacuum; a substantial obstruction will cause it to re-route. Apples are pretty soft though, so worst case it'd probably just slice it up.

> collect the grass

I've always preferred to just mulch it and let it lay. I leave the debris clogged in the ejection port and crank the RPM to max to hopefully dice the refuse. I'll open the ejection port up if an area gets too long between mows, but I doubt I'll have to.

Chopping up the apples is really not worst case at all. They're drops, so for me, they're abandoned.

The clippings, it would be nice if they could be collected for compost or chicken fodder.

I have an unsolved problem which is how to get the apple drops to the chickens, or the chickens to the apple drops, without me doing effort or chickens ending up roosted in the apple trees. We don't have any chickens yet, but this is something I want to solve before getting any...
That is an approach. That said, I would rather not have chicken shit in the yard as well, and moreover, I'd like to be able to age it and convert it into a convenient manure pile which I can use for whatever I'm growing... So keeping them in a fenced area and bringing the clippings to them has an advantage too.

IDK, I'm still weighing different ideas here, nothing has jumped out as a massive win, but generally speaking a machine that can bring all of the biomass from the yard and dump it in the chicken pen seems like it should be part of the strategy...

@cjd @eriner @restful I have a mobile chicken coop that I move its length every day. It spreads out their fertilizer and saves having to clean the coop (other than the quarterly decontamination to control for mites). It's a light frame on wheels, chicken wire sides and roof covered in dense shade cloth (and a tarp over that in the winter which makes me feel better, but we don't have snow).

I initially locked them in for 2 weeks and now they return to it nightly regardless of where it is.