I am not a gardener. I want to be one, just as I want to be someone who batch-cooks on Sundays and goes to bed before eleven. It just hasn’t happened yet.
What did happen was that our garden became an embarrassment. Not in a quirky, overgrown-cottage way. In a “the neighbours have definitely noticed” way. The grass was long, patchy in places, and at some point during a particularly chaotic half-term, our youngest had dragged a paddling pool across the lawn and left a perfect rectangular yellow patch where the sun couldn’t reach.
The problem wasn’t that we didn’t care. It was that mowing the lawn requires time, and time is the one thing consistently in short supply when you’re juggling school runs, after-school clubs, work, and the hundred other things that fill a week before you’ve noticed it’s Thursday.
The lawn that nobody had time for
Saturday mornings were the obvious window. Except on Saturdays, our house is already full. If you’re looking for inspiration, we’ve had great luck with the ideas in London Mums’ round-up of top things to do with the kids this June, every weekend accounted for, which is wonderful, except it means the mower stays in the shed.
Sunday afternoons were the backup plan. But Sunday afternoons have a way of disappearing, too. And so the grass kept growing, and I kept walking past it with a vague sense of guilt, the way you do with an unread book you keep meaning to get to.
Something had to change. What changed was a robot mower.
What is a robot lawn mower, exactly?
If you’ve never looked into them, here’s a short intro: a robot lawn mower is a small, self-guided machine that cuts your grass automatically, on a schedule you set, without you doing anything.
Unlike robot hoovers, which bump around your living room in a way that makes the dog suspicious, the better robot mowers now use GPS-based navigation. There’s no need to bury a wire around your lawn boundary. You map the area once using an app, set your mowing schedule, and the machine gets on with it.
It mows a little each day, which is actually better for the grass than taking off too much at once. The clippings are tiny and fall back into the lawn as a kind of natural fertiliser. The result, over a couple of weeks, is a noticeably neater, healthier-looking garden.
The noise is closer to a quiet hum, not the roar of a petrol mower. Our neighbours have not complained. Our dog was cautious for about three days and then completely lost interest.
Why we chose the Segway Navimow Mowers
I spent more time than I’d like to admit reading reviews and watching comparison videos. The thing that kept coming up was whether a mower needed a perimeter wire or not. Older models required you to lay a physical wire around your garden boundary, a setup job that can take hours and needs to be redone if it gets damaged.
The Segway Navimow robot mowers don’t need one. They use EFLS (Exact Fusion Locating System), which combines GPS with other sensors to map and navigate the garden accurately without any buried wire. That alone made it far more appealing to me, because I knew that if the setup was complicated, it would never get done.
The app is simple. You configure the boundary of your lawn once, and the mower tracks it, set your preferred mowing times, and that’s largely it. It handles slopes, navigates around obstacles, and returns to its charging dock when the battery runs low or when it starts to rain.
Ours has been running for several months now. We’ve barely touched it.
What actually changed in our garden (and our routine)
The lawn looks better than it ever has. That’s the honest answer. Not show-garden perfect, but consistently neat in a way that makes the whole garden feel more cared for. The yellow patch from the paddling pool incident has mostly recovered.
The kids find it mildly fascinating. My eldest spent a while trying to figure out how it navigates around the trampoline. My youngest just calls it “the garden robot” and occasionally goes outside to check it’s still working, which I consider a win for their interest in technology.
The bigger change is what we do with the time we’ve got back. We’re actually using the garden now. We’ve had friends over, the kids have friends round more, and we’ve made it onto the London Mums spring bucket list without feeling like the garden needed to be sorted first.
Is it worth it for a UK family?
Robot mowers work best on relatively flat lawns without too many tight corners or awkward narrow strips. Our garden is fairly straightforward, and it handles it without issue. If your garden is more complex, it’s worth checking the specs of whichever model you’re looking at.
The upfront cost is higher than that of a standard mower. But when I think about the hours we’ve stopped spending on a task neither of us particularly wanted to do, and the fact that the garden now looks consistently better than when we were doing it ourselves, it feels like a reasonable trade.
UK summers are short. As we’ve written before, there’s already so much competing for your time, whether that’s feeling your best for a beach day or getting through the week without collapsing. Automating the lawn is one less job sitting on your mind. With the right robot mower, your garden stays neat in the background, leaving you more time to enjoy it.
Monica Costa founded London Mums in September 2006 after her son Diego’s birth together with a group of mothers who felt the need of meeting up regularly to share the challenges and joys of motherhood in metropolitan and multicultural London. London Mums is the FREE and independent peer support group for mums and mumpreneurs based in London https://www.londonmumsmagazine.com and you can connect on Twitter @londonmums
