Day 44

Mechanically inclined I am not. I can get by, but it's not pretty and plenty of mistakes are made along the way. In terms of lawn maintenance, I can handle a regular lawn mower but when you acquire a twenty acre of land, bigger, more powerful equipment is needed. 

I’ve always been a fan of “the more you grow, the less you mow mentality.”  I practice No Mow May to help pollinators and I am absolutely not a lawn enthusiast who feels the need or desire to keep the perfect lawn. When living right next to others, this can pose certain issues. I am certain that my neighbors, nice as they are, secretly despised the act that I didn't keep my lawn as meticulous as they would have preferred. I don't want to go too far off on a tangent here, but the fact that so many homeowners have an unhealthy addiction to maintaining a perfectly  pristine and manicured homogeneous, non-native grass lawn annoys me to the highest level. I think I often let my grass grow out not due to loneliness but as a simple way to fight the system. However, I was often in that fight alone. In fact, my neighbors began to mow my lawn for me at my previous house, probably because they knew my philosophy didn’t quite fit in.

At the farm, there was plenty of grass to mow. Darn near twenty acres of it. While our ultimate goal was to replace as much lawn as possible, this was a long-term project. Until we reached that point, we would need to invest in equipment to help be able to take care of that lawn quickly so we could spend time on more important things.

That same neighbor who mowed our lawn on a regular basis also fixed up riding mowers just for fun. Knowing one would come in handy, we purchased one off of him before we moved.

Not being a skilled handyman, I relied on this man for many things over our time as neighbors. When we got this riding mower from him, we were confident it could handle the job of mowing our new lawn.

We were wrong.