40 degrees out going up to a balmy 68 today, and 70 tomorrow, due to rain and warm front coming up.
I'm headed downtown early to get a pallet of 30 bags of brown cow cow manure and will hopefully get to dump them in the new garden
before the rain comes in. It may be too soft to take the tractor in there today, still the last of snow melting here.
Dug up some dirt from four places in the garden, mixed them together to do a soil test, then realized I didn't have any distilled water.
I keep forgetting to buy it.
Udometer. New word I learned yesterday since it came in the mail.
It's the graduated glass beaker for a rain gauge.
It's what you need to replace when you forget to dump out the water
before 0 degree weather shows up.
When I bought my JD diesel garden tractor, it was the least expensive five foot deck steering wheel equipped diesel mower I could find.
Just aren't that many made, for those of us who can't use zero turns. it cost 12K because I didn't want to spend 20k on the Kubota.
But since my arthritis has gotten worse, more than two hours behind the wheel just kills me. Hands and wrists swell up, very unpleasant.
So I needed to up my game and get a six foot deck so I could finish earlier, and this Kubota seems to be the least expensive six foot deck diesel mower
with a steering wheel I can find. I set a spec and try to spend as little as possible. I know that sounds a little dubious when you are spending this kind of money
but we all spent fairly serious money on a tractor, so we all know the cost of machinery.
This is the "smaller" model versus the 39hp 4wd version. I live on such flat land I saw no need to spend 3k more on 4wd for my model.
You can get the larger model with a 100 inch folding mower up front with cab and a/c. I think 50k....
It's not hard to see where the money goes though. Massive frame, like a tractor on this new mower, everything is commercial grade.
Frankly if they made something not so heavy duty for less money with the same deck I would have bought it, but I don't have a lot of choices when
you can only drive mostly with one arm. The dealer put a shiny new "necker knob" on my steering wheel as a bonus.
It's an asset, I will take care of it, and when I have to sell this place someday, it will be hold its value very well. My brother's is 21 years old now, most people
don't give them up because I guess the mowers don't give up.
