We finally cave-in...

A newly minted lawn cowboy rustles up some grass clippings.

Find the grass-cutting Waldo in this scene. This gives an idea of how much grass we used to cut with the push mower.

The beast waits for a chance to cut more grass.

View from the rear.

When we bought our place in the Fall of 2006, it came with an old lawn tractor. When I say old I should say 17 year old lawn tractor. After a lot of fussing and fiddling and spending money on parts, I got the thing to run three times during the early weeks of the 2007 mowing season. When the old thing refused to start anymore we thankfully got rid of it. But that posed the question of whether we should replace it. We had an almost new push mower, and using it seemed much more environmentally responsible than buying a big ole lawn tractor. Plus, if our bathroom scales were anywhere close to accurate, we really needed the exercise. So last year we put in the exquisite wildflower meadow to cut down on the total mowing area (see earlier post), and we mowed our 1.5 to 2 acres of grass with a regular old push mower. Wasn't even self-propelled. We felt pretty darn virtuous (and pretty darn exercised) I have to admit. But then a funny thing happened this year. As the mowing season began in earnest, the more we mowed, the more our virtue began to have a bitter taste. It would take us 4-5 hours to mow the lawn which we basically did an hour at a time over 4-5 days. Then we'd get a day or two off and start over again. On a recent visit our daughter asked us what in the world we were thinking. (That's what children tend to do when their parents are doing something completely irrational.) We defended ourselves of course mentioning in no particular order global warming, noise pollution, our carbon footprint, dying polar bears, the global food shortage, Chinese child laborers and a few other things that I can't remember right now. But late at night lying in bed, too sore to sleep because of all the mowing, we would dream of a lawn tractor. Then Sears had a sale, and we became weak and went out and bought the darn thing. Funny thing is, the tractor uses less gas to mow the lawn than we used to use with the push mower. Wish I'd known that last year!

p.s. For you gear heads, the tractor runs a 24 hp, 2 cylinder, Briggs & Stratton Intek engine coupled to a hydrostatic transmission. The cutting width is 42 inches.