Why You Should Add Cooking Spray to Your Lawn Mower

Cooking spray is great for making sure your eggs don’t stick to your frying pan in the morning, or ensuring your cakes and cookies release with ease. But, most people probably don’t think about utilizing it outside of the kitchen. However, if you’re a homeowner tasked with the job of mowing your lawn, you might want to consider keeping a can of cooking spray in the garage.

No, not for baking—for keeping your lawnmower blades clean.

This simple, effective hack can make the difficult job of mowing a lot less labor-intensive and messy.

Most people mow weekly or bi-weekly depending on how quickly your grass seems to go. While mowing, itself, can be a chore, there’s nothing worse than getting your lawnmower blades clogged up with wet grass.

Unfortunately, that can easily occur when you’re mowing thick, long grass, or when it’s not fully dry. When your blades get impacted with grass, they don’t function properly and won’t cut correctly.

When that happens, you have the less-than-pleasant task of flipping your mower over and digging away at the grass to dispose of it. Some of it can really be packed in there, creating quite a chore!

That’s where cooking spray comes in.

With a quick spritz of cooking spray on clean mower blades, you can reduce the risk of grass getting stuck beneath your mower.

If your lawnmower has seen better days, make sure you do a thorough scraping and cleaning before giving it a spray. Simply turn it over onto its side so the blades are exposed—making sure it’s off, of course! Then, grab the hose.

Direct the spray from the hose on the impacted grass surrounding your blades. Ideally, the water pressure will loosen and get rid of most of it. If not, put on your garden gloves and use a scraping utensil like a putty knife to clear away the rest.

Once your blades are clean, you can give them a spritz with a vegetable-oil-based cooking spray.

The cooking spray should keep your blades clean the next time you mow the grass, and it’s a great practice to put in place before your weekly chore. Ideally, if you spray beneath your mower before each time you cut the grass, you won’t have to deal with a clogged mess of wet, compacted grass keeping your machine from doing its job.

So, keep a can of Pam in the garage if you tend to struggle with long or thick grass. It only takes a few minutes to spray your blades, and it can make a world of difference.