Holy cow with you guys paying thousands of $$$ for those cute little riding mowers!
This place, having been used as pasture for some decades before I started "taming" the
Johnson grass 25 years ago (y'all from around these parts know what I mean by "Johnson
grass") EATS riding mowers for lunch and spits out the front axles.
Been there, tried that...
As I remind folks, the place may look nice, but these aren't
lawns out here - they literally are
semi-tamed pasture, with an extremely hardy hay-grass that literally dulls your blades as you
cut it. The ground itself, being about 4-6" topsoil on top of southern clay (with lots of rock base
under that - this is marble country, after all) isn't quite as smooth as your standard issue
subdivision grading, either - and decades of running over it with a tractor hasn't improved that
much.
They say "clay remembers" - boy, and how! We've literally had dual axle tandems up here on
the yard on dry days - emphasis on
dry.
When we've had decent rain, the grass grows fast and you gotta stay on top of it - but when it
goes dry, the grass literally stops growing (that's part of being hardy, I reckon).
For the last 17 years, I've owned a compact tractor - 30hp diesel 4x4 Massey-Ferguson (made by
Iseki in Japan) with the "halfway" tires on it (not full agro, not turf tires) utilizing a pull-behind
Maschio finish mowing deck built in Italy (!). Both have been beat on relentlessly for all these
years now; the tractor is simply indestructible and goes freaking forever on 5 gallons #2 diesel
(I can mow the place
twice on a tank usually, and we're talking acres here). The deck is thick
as the dickens, but keeping a good set of spindles and blades on it is a challenge due to the
abuse. Fortunately, parts are cheap and I get a season or so out of a set of blades.
Of course, the tractor is also pressed into duty as the official vehicle of the half mile of road out
here (between my own road and the tiny one-lane county road I look after as well), all gravel
and some quite steep.
Me being me, I've even perfected snow removal from gravel. Serious. Yeah, I ain't right...
Oh, and the rule around here on who does what is simple:
I am responsible for everything outside the house, she's got the inside (other than all the remodeling,
wiring, plumbing, heavy moving, etc. of course).
Lisa actually likes to mow (she's never in a hurry with it), but I usually go about mach 7 when I do it,
so there's never much for her to mow on these days - and I wouldn't be braggin' about it if she were
to do it all the time.
Sorry, that's not right to ask of the wife, least to me. I got it.