Rural Backyard Series: Landscape Maintenance
Maintenance of your landscape like maintenance of your house is important? Do you want low maintenance? There are a multitude of ways to implement a low maintenance landscape. Remember, there is no such thing as zero maintenance unless you hire someone to do it for you. Maintaining a landscape is half the fun of having a beautiful landscape. Adding to it and even subtracting from it when something doesn’t work or something is planted in the wrong location is part of the growth of your backyard landscape just as it is when you change the interior design of a room in your home.
Maintaining your landscape requires the proper equipment. You can buy too much, spend too much and still want more only to find out you are falling behind or spending too much time maintaining the equipment. This can happen. Experience is a great teacher. What equipment do you need? It all depends on your landscape and how much time you have to devote to maintenance.
If you have an acre of lawn and you buy a 21″ self-propelled mower you are going to spend up to 4 hours just mowing. If you have a rider with a 30″ cut you’ll spend you’ll cut your time in half and if you have a zero-turn rider with a 52″ cut you’ll be done before you start. You also have to take into account the terrain of your landscape. Some riders won’t work on steep slopes, some won’t work in wet weather and some just won’t work when you want them to because you spent too little money on your purchase. You do get what you pay for. I’m not advocating John Deere, but I’ve owned one since before time and I vary rarely ever spend more time on maintenance of my equipment than I do maintaining my lawn. A little extra power in lawn maintenance equipment is much better than just be ing underpowered. You can’t mow in the rain with an under powered machine and sometimes you just have to mow when it is wet or fall so far behind that you have a hard time finding your equipment in the tall grass when it does stop raining. I guess the bottom line is do your homework and don’t underestimate your needs. Other needs might include a front end loader on a tractor if you have a very large rural property. Tractors save time. Move a mulch pile with a manure fork or move it with a 1/3 yard bucket loader and see who wins. If time is all you have then the pitch fork is for you. Owning both is optimum! Changing your landscape’s terrain is next to impossible with a shovel, so you may want to own or rent equipment that makes it possible to get the desired result for your backyard landscape. You can always hire a landscape contractor to do your big jobs if you find you’d have no other use for a small utility tractor.
