Take control of your lawn with a laser

Great outdoors:If you hate to mow the lawn then visit Joey Crofts' stand at the RDS. He has developed a lawn care device that uses a laser beam rather than cutters to keep the grass under control.

Inspiration for this device, which singes off the top of the grass blades, came from the fact that he too would rather be doing something else with his free time in the summer. "I hate lawn mowing," said the 14-year-old second year. "I have to cut our lawn at least every week."

Joey started studying ways to automate this activity, finally coming up with the idea of using a laser beam strong enough to level off the grass blades.

"It singes the top which is better for the grass than cutting. And the laser doesn't have to be that strong," he said.

He researched lasers and found that a laser no stronger than one watt output was sufficient to trim grass blades. The approach was also better for the environment as no fossil fuel was needed and there is no petrol exhaust, he added.

There was little risk involved in controlling the laser. "That is all very simple, you could use cut-off sensors to protect people or you could cut the grass at night when the beam could be seen," he suggested.

"It would be needed more for football pitches than for gardens," he said, and costs would be no more than the several hundred euro needed to buy a conventional mower.

The great outdoors also featured in a biodiversity project prepared by Deirdre McAuliffe, Lorna Murphy and Olivia Lyons, all aged 16, of Coláiste Choilm, Ballincollig, Co Cork. The hero in their research study was the carabidae beetle, a ground dweller.

The object was to trap and count beetle populations under hedgerows as a way to measure overall biodiversity, explained Lorna. The more beetles, the better the habitat and more abundant the prey. They studied regularly cut hedgerows, those infrequently cut and hedges that had become completely overgrown.

An initial unexpected finding was that the "back to nature" unkempt row had the lowest biodiversity while frequently cut hedges had the highest, on the basis of beetle numbers. "It doesn't compare with the expected theory," suggested Olivia. The team set the beetle traps and measured other parameters such as temperature, weather and other conditions that might have influenced numbers. They would like to look at beetle populations during the summer and early autumn, as their tests were conducted later in the year when beetle activity was lower.