At Waterloo Farm we have a lot of grass and it has been somewhat of a dilemma as to the best way to go about cutting it! This may sound like a pretty stupid statement – surely you just get a ride-on mower and cut the stuff – but given the state of the grass and ground when we first moved in we have had to give it some thought to come up with a good solution.
Before we moved in one of the local farmers came to top the grass … unfortunately he was not able to collect it so great mounds were left laying around killing any grass underneath and looking pretty unsightly. Also, the fact that it was an agricultural-sized tractor did not do wonders for the ground when it was pretty wet. So we called in some local landscapers who have all the necessary equipment in ‘miniature’ so it doesn’t damage the ground, and they practically performed a miracle in getting the area from an overgrown ‘field’ to something closer to a lawn!
First they also topped it but with a much smaller machine which did not damage the soft ground. Then they used a large ‘rake’ to gather it into rows of what was essentially hay which they then gathered up and put in a pile in the top paddock out of view. When they had finished we had our own haystack which was about 4 metres long and 2 metres high!! Then, having collected a lot of the surplus grass, they finished it off with a sturdy lawn tractor which mulched the grass (i.e. finely cut it). When they had finished – and they did warn us about this – it looked awful, practically dead because the grass had been cut so short as you can see from the photos! However, in a matter of days it began to green up and look like a ‘lush’ lawn rather than dead grass!
Then of course we needed to think about how we are going to manage the grass ourselves as clearly we can’t have someone coming in every week to cut it for us. After much research (boys and their toys!), Nigel finally opted for a Husqvarna YTH220 Twin Garden Tractor which should be robust enough to cope with our rather knackered ground, but also has a wide cutting deck to hopefully reduce the number of times we have to trundle up and down the garden every time we cut the grass. It has a mulching deck so no need to collect the grass (can you imagine the size of our grass pile!).
The kids think it’s fantastic and it has been named ‘Husky’! I’ve been ‘allowed’ to use it once so far and enjoyed it, even though I did get quite cold and it is pretty noisy making ear-defenders a necessity! The ground is pretty rough at the moment so you have to go slowly, slower than walking pace, but in time we hope to be able to level the ground and maybe reach the dizzy heights of 5mph! Of course the more trees we plant and veg patches we build, the less grass there will be to cut, but for now we estimate that it will probably take around 2.5 hours each time to cut the whole area … you know what we’ll be doing the whole summer long then 
Tags: Garden Tractor, Grass Cutting, Husqvarna, Husqvarna YTH220 Twin, Lawn Tractor, Mulching, Mulching Mower, Ride on Garden Tractor Mower
Categories: Garden Improvements, Living the Country Life, Posts with Photos