Should I put my (antique) lawn tractor into the moving van, or donate it to science?
I will be living in (what I consider) a cabin in Inver Grove Heights, MN this summer, and very probably staying there for a year.
Currently I am building road boxes and deciding which things to take with and which to sell.
Now, here in Tennessee, the mowing season is seven months long and the grass grows aggressively, so that you need decent equipment to ride herd on it.
Now, this cabin in the Great Frozen North has a bit more yard than I’d want to mow with a push mower using the kind of reckoning we would do in Tennessee, but it occurs to me that the mowing season up there might be shorter, and that the ole grass might not be as pernicious.
Heh. A cabin in a first ring suburb? Not real rural if you ask me. That said, yes we do have a short growing season, but that grass is aggressive. We get a lot of moisture in the summer (to fill those 10,000 lakes) so growing isn’t a problem. But the tractor can come into play also if you have a long driveway (as is pretty normal for IGH) you might get a plow attachment for winter snow, and if you have any leaf gathering attachments, out that way there is a lot of oak and elm, so there are a lot of leaves to get rid of in the fall where a tractor might come into play (A good mulching system will work as well. I tend to mulch the leaves where they lay).
Minnesota can change a bit from year to year. But, on average, you’ll be starting mowing in May and be done in October…six months tops. In a dry year with no irrigation system, there could be a month in the middle (July or August) where you don’t mow at all. On the other hand, if it’s a wet year, you could be mowing once or twice a week for 6 months. (That would be extreme, though)
One of the reasons we rented this place is that the guy keeps his professional plow parked up the hill, so he plows our driveway on his way out. I have no experience in snow removal.
Anyway, it isn’t really a cabin, it’s more like a small sixties-era house, with a dug basement, which I am told is pretty standard. I liked it because it is labyrinthine, like a rabbit warren, and so reminded me of some houses from my youth.
I also liked it because outside in the snow were deer, rabbit, and turkey tracks as well as the tracks of some (must be immense) web-footed waterfowl.
So it sounds like I really ought to bring the dadgum tractor up there.
I saw an ad for a snow thrower you put on the front of a lawn tractor–it says you need wheel weights and chains as well. I have no idea what powers it, whether it be the tractor motor or its own, but the picture had it throwing hella snow. . .
I won’t need to clear but the driveway proper, which is about the area of a two-car garage, perhaps a little longer, cause the guy keeps his professional plowing rig right up there at the top of the hill.