I have been eyeballing one of these reel mowers since December but had a hard time pulling the trigger to purchase one when my push mower still worked. Well, I just "happeend" to be walking through the Lowes lawnmower dept a week or two ago and spotted it sitting on display - at $190 how could I NOT buy it! :) First of all, let me say that I only have approx 7000sqft of lawn to mow. The front yard is full KBG and the back is a mix of KBG and Tall Fescue. I love having a nice lawn and mowing my yard, but have always had a hard time telling my children "I can't play tonight, daddy has to cut the lawn again and you can't be in the yard when I'm doing it", so this was one of the main reasons I purchased the Fiskars. Here are my bullet points on likes/dislikes so far: LIKES 1. It is very quiet! I goofed around and talked with my children as I mowed the lawn right next to them last night. I now can also cut my lawn when my children are asleep or taking naps. 2. It is no more difficult to push than my "non self propelled" craftsman mower, and may possibly be easier. 3. It cut right through my 4-4.5" high KBG down to 3" without breaking a sweat, and the fine clippings it kicks out just drop into my lawn, unlike my old gas mulcher which tended to clump. The grass in my back yard is extremely dense and thick and really should be mowed every 2-3 days as fast as it grows. The Fiskars cut right through it with only a little more effort than the front lawn. 4. It gives a very nicely groomed and level cut. This style of cutting is also healthier for my grass 5. It is so easy to just brush off and roll into the garage when i am done. Less space needed to store it as well. 6. No gas fumes or exhaust! 7. Love that it cut's up to 4" high. 8. It is fun (at least right now)! I enjoy the looks I am getting from neighbors and cars driving by :) DISLIKES 1. I am 6'5" tall and have had a little bit of trouble getting used to the height/angle of the handle. But, I have this trouble with all sorts of things, so it's just a matter of getting my back and muscles used to the new positioning compared to my old mower. 2. I miss not being able to cut the grass on the "pull back" of the mower. it obviously only cuts when being pushed forward, but this is a small complaint. That's it - I love everything else about it! I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have them.

I also have the Fiskars one that has the 3 hole punch attached to it (the personal trimmer) and I also LOVE IT! I have the guillotine type from Cre@tive MemOries and do not like it. I purchased both at the same time and I still have not had to change the blade in my fiskar one but the CM is dull and I really can not use it anymore. Don't wast your money on one. And I did use them about the same amount, the fiskars a little more often. P.S. :I have a friend that has the LARGE rotary trimmer from fiskars, I used it a couple of times and I really like it. Especially for large papers. This will most likely be my next big scrapbooking purchase. I had one a few years ago and did not like it but they have since changed the design and I thought it was great.

I'm not a big CM fan. Their paper cutter is too small and doesn't cut the 12 by 12 pages. Mine also cuts a ragged edge from the start it never did cut well. Their circle and oval cutters are the best that I have ever found. Why anyone would spend mega bucks on things like their square punches is beyond me when it is so simple to take an ordinary cutter and cut a square. I love the Friskars type cutter because it is a cinch to make a frame using this type of cutter. Many of the girls at our local scrapbooking store started with the CM albums and are getting very bored with the white pages and end up covering them with the fancy papers. Their albums are expensive but the quality is better than some of the cheaper albums out there. The best albums I have found are from a company called Fraser-Grimm. It's a small company that I believe operates out of Windsor Ontario but my local scrapbooking store sells their albums. They are durably made and covered with fabric and they have quite a selection. I bought some special fabric and had them make me an individual album and they did a beautiful job. I'm not big on stickers. I make most of my own embellishments so I can't comment on those since I don't use them.

I hope cutting them back and using the horticultural oil saves them, Sammy, so you don't have to give them up. In my county, where the soil and water generally are pretty alkaline, Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida) just does not grow well, if it even grows at all. They generally prefer moist, acidic, rich soil high in organic matter in part shade, and have to be watered a lot in the summer---so nothing about my area is right for them. They also have trouble with aphids, scale and borers, and several diseases plague them. Consequently, I never see them here and don't know anyone who has one in our area. I think they are very beautiful when grown in the right conditions, at least during their bloom period, but they require a lot of care. Far to our east in McCurtain County, they do pretty well in the Broken Bow area so I know there's places in OK where they can thrive. We have a native dogwood here that tolerates our alkaline soil and water. It is called Roughleaf Dogwood (Cornus drummondi). It is an understory tree that really is more of a shrub than a tree, and it suckers persistently and forms groves. Ours only get maybe 10' tall, max, and grow aggressively. They are common along rural fencelines where they mix in with the native plums and other trees that birds like to plant. Once you have them, you never can get rid of them. They have white flowers followed by white berries, and while I love them while they are in bloom, and I think the white berries look nice.....the foliage of the trees always has various fungal type spotting and stuff. They look really pretty from a distance, and then when you get up close and see the diseased foliage, that prettiness fades. I'd never plant one in our landscape on purpose, but we inherited some that were on the property when we moved here and our attempts to cut them down failed, as it only seemed to encourage them to come back strong and with lots of suckering and new trees. So, they live on undereath our pecan trees and I just ignore them. I planted four o'clocks around them and the four o'clocks are so pretty while in bloom that it makes up for the foliage on the roughleaf dogwoods looking so bad all the time. Since they're in the shade of the pecan tree, the four o'clocks stretch for light and get leggy and often attain 5-6' in height in the summer, so they help hide a lot of the dogwood foliage. If you're looking for a low-maintenance tree, I'm not sure flowering dogwood fits the bill. Perhaps they will do a lot better there if you've got the kind of soil they need. I think they do best in a soil pH around 5.5 or so. Mine runs 8.2, so you can see why we cannot give flowering dogwood trees the conditions they need here. Variety selection is important too because flowering dogwoods come in different sizes, and many of them easily get 25-30' tall. I know there are some cultivars that stay significantly shorter.