It's a lawn mower, or as the John Deere people like to call it, a lawn tractor. We call it a "riding mower." I've spent a thousand hours upon it and upon its used-to-death predecessor. Keeping up the lawns take just about three hours — twice a week in May and June, bi-weekly come a dry September. It's a useful machine — uncomplicated, rarely out of service, finely engineered. With its wide cutting deck, I can maintain the lawns with minimum of fuss. It's a royal pain when it does break dow. You can read such a failure here.
But it's not the mower but the #10 cart that has changed my life for the better. I came into possession of the cart twenty years ago, and have used it, hard, every summer since. Sometimes it develops a flat tire, but otherwise, it's perfect.
In the pre-cart days, from 1968 to 2000, I possessed only a battered old wheelbarrow. If you want to move manure from the pile to the garden, you can fill a wheelbarrow with about two cubic feet of material. Then you use your own personal arms and legs to haul the wheelbarrow to its target, always uphill, and dump it. But if you use the cart to move manure, you can fill it with a full cubic yard or perhaps more of the "well-dried." Then you hop gracefully onto the lawn tractor and let the mower pull the cart to your garden. The machine does the hard work and your back doesn't "go out." (The rear panel of the cart is removable and with not much effort the front of the cart can be raised to dump stuff out the back). You drive away a few feet and the cart empties itself.
Same thing with brush. If you've accumulated a couple of hours worth of brush and weeds, and you want to move it to the brush pile — why then, a trip's worth is only what you can carry in your arms. But with the cart, you can stack and compress the stuff and move ten times as much, especially if you've learned how to make use of bungee cords. And again, you don't have to carry or drag; you let the machine do the hard work. Some decry the gasoline engine, but I'm all gratitude.
The cart allows me to do many times the amount of work as a wheelbarrow, and at much less cost to my aging body. It's a gol durn miracle.
(Those are NGP's miniature donkeys, Big Joe and Little Joe, in the background. They may not be aware of it, but they've also made important contributions to garden fertility.
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