Not sure if I should be looking at tractors, or something else...for 1 acre...

[herm0016]

i have an acre, and a 3000 lb ish tractor with a loader and a back blade. I use it nearly every weekend and have put 20 hrs on it over the course of the last 4 months. Put an hour on it last night plowing snow on 2 good size driveways. i bought it for the price of renting a skidsteer for about 4 days.

if you are diligent at watching craigslist and similar, you will find something for 5 - 7 k I think its worth having the equipment. if you get do get to a point you are not using it much, you can always sell, and less expensive loader tractors are always in demand.

call messicks or asap or someone and see if they can help find a hood.

Yanmar3 Tractor - farm & garden - by owner - sale

 

[BadDecisions]

The time part for me is that I can do fab work at 2am in the garage when it's pitch black outside....tending to the weed overgrowths, not so much. Admittedly though, a large part of it for me as well has been personal project and customer project over load, along with not planning enough time for the property maintenance, and not being as serious about it as I should have been. I'm now restructuring my life, with the hopeful goal of opening up a good chunk of spare time.

Running a mower over the stuff isn't a good idea to me...product of lesson learned the hard way. Along with an acre of weeds and scrub brush, there are also small rocks and pebbles over most of it as well....which the mower picks up and launches into my windows quite nicely. Two windows later (one on the house, one on the camper out back), I decided mowing wasn't such an excellent idea after all.

My thinking was to blade a good portion of the ground to just flat remove the majority of the grassy weeds and thick brush, leaving behind a few larger bushes along with the several Palo Verde and mesquite trees that are in the back (or maybe this is a landscape rake kind of job?). This is the kind of thing that I'm thinking I can do an hour here, an hour there after work during the week if need be. When one of my local friends had his shop building put up, the builder bladed most of the 1/2 acre in the back, and it did end up being a lot nicer than I expected it to be after he brought in a few loads of small rocks to cover the ground again, and now he says it's just a matter of hitting the occasional sprout with some glysophate. Though his property started out with FAR less brushy stuff than mine has.

 

[jaxs]

The time part for me is that I can do fab work at 2am in the garage when it's pitch black outside....tending to the weed overgrowths, not so much. Admittedly though, a large part of it for me as well has been personal project and customer project over load, along with not planning enough time for the property maintenance, and not being as serious about it as I should have been. I'm now restructuring my life, with the hopeful goal of opening up a good chunk of spare time.

Running a mower over the stuff isn't a good idea to me...product of lesson learned the hard way. Along with an acre of weeds and scrub brush, there are also small rocks and pebbles over most of it as well....which the mower picks up and launches into my windows quite nicely. Two windows later (one on the house, one on the camper out back), I decided mowing wasn't such an excellent idea after all.

My thinking was to blade a good portion of the ground to just flat remove the majority of the grassy weeds and thick brush, leaving behind a few larger bushes along with the several Palo Verde and mesquite trees that are in the back (or maybe this is a landscape rake kind of job?). This is the kind of thing that I'm thinking I can do an hour here, an hour there after work during the week if need be. When one of my local friends had his shop building put up, the builder bladed most of the 1/2 acre in the back, and it did end up being a lot nicer than I expected it to be after he brought in a few loads of small rocks to cover the ground again, and now he says it's just a matter of hitting the occasional sprout with some glysophate. Though his property started out with FAR less brushy stuff than mine has.

You are in over your head,way over your head. It requires commercial equipment far bigger than a tractor you are thinking of to do this.
Were it not obvious how little experience you have,I would suggest renting a machine for one day. No offense but I'm more convinced than before you should stick to what you know and hire the rest done.

 

[BadDecisions]

You are in over your head,way over your head. It requires commercial equipment far bigger than a tractor you are thinking of to do this.
Were it not obvious how little experience you have,I would suggest renting a machine for one day. No offense but I'm more convinced than before you should stick to what you know and hire the rest done.

Which is an entirely fair assessment, and why I've learned to ask questions before dropping a ton of money on something that might not work the way I expected. I've already got nearly 40 years of experience learning many other things the hard way, and now I'd like to learn things the way that doesn't cost me tens of thousands of dollars, lol.

Far too many things seem to come simply with the advice of "buy the biggest you can afford", but rarely with guidance of what sizes are applicable to which types of work, and then what happens if the biggest one I can afford is still an entirely incorrect tool for the job at hand? Then I've potentially dropped a lot of money on something that ends up as a really expensive garage adornment.

I suppose I may just have to schedule some future time off along with a clearing company to come out then.

 

[jaxs]

" I suppose I may just have to schedule some future time off along with a clearing company to come out then. "

Good decision. While that take's place,you can shop for a mower suitable for an acre lot. There are farmers and ranchers with nice tractors that hire land cleared and dirt moved because it require's special equipment.

 

[BadDecisions]

" I suppose I may just have to schedule some future time off along with a clearing company to come out then. "

Good decision. While that take's place,you can shop for a mower suitable for an acre lot. There are farmers and ranchers with nice tractors that hire land cleared and dirt moved because it require's special equipment.

To be accurate, I don't want stuff out there that requires mowing. A large part of my moving to the desert was to get away from my wicked hay fever. Back in Michigan, I could get about 5 minutes into a grass cutting adventure before I had trouble breathing. As I noted earlier, I already tried the mowing route (with a full on respirator), and while the Craftsman lawn tractor I already have managed to cut down even the thin brushy stuff without issue, it also proved to be very adept at launching rocks long distances into easily breakable things like my windows. Granted, that was largely due to MY not paying enough attention to the direction the discharge chute was pointing, :laughing:, but I also never expected it to have enough power to launch rocks that far or that high either. But the other side of this is that even if I were to have the entire lot graded out, I still live on a plot of very sandy/rocky soil, and I know that's going to tear up any mower being ran over it as there's no way I'm dealing with the upkeep of a nice lawn over this much ground.

My entire lot is open desert, thus also covered in small rocks and pebbles, very sandy/rocky type soil, and not at all condusive to growing nice lawns. Somewhat similar to this -

 

[dodge man]

I'll add another thought, do you want a tractor? Is it something you would enjoy having around? Can you afford one? If so get one. If on the other hand it would seem like a necessary evil, I agree, hire it done.

 

[BadDecisions]

I'll add another thought, do you want a tractor? Is it something you would enjoy having around? Can you afford one? If so get one. If on the other hand it would seem like a necessary evil, I agree, hire it done.

I consider it a necessary evil in the same way that I consider the household appliances necessary evils :laughing:. I've never once found myself thinking "you know what I REALLY want? A clothes washer!" I'd love it if I never had to wash clothes or dishes ever again, or vacuum the house, or make meals, or ever do any of the property maintenance at all. I could spend all my free time playing with the trucks or other toys in my life.

But reality is that I'm just an average guy that grew up poor and somehow fell into a blue collar career in tech maintenance that now makes a bit over the national median salary. I do OK money wise, especially considering I'm now single and without kids, but I'd never be able to afford having someone come in and do all of the things that I don't want to do either.

I'm also thinking that this isn't going to be a once and done kind of deal. Especially with tasks like keeping the wash clean, and dragging the driveway and road...I've got about a 1/3rd of a mile of ground to cover between my property and the nearest pavement, as there are several vacant lots as well between me and pavement (house was built right before the market crashed, and the other planned houses here never went up, and I bought it near the bottom of it all), and I know dragging that road is going to tear up the lawn tractor.

To me, it's kind of like how I never wanted to _own_ a home either..I like the idea of not being in debt for the next 30 years by renting, and letting someone _else_ deal with all the major maintenance & repair duties, but I also liked basically locking my "rent" costs down to the mortgage payment which will never go up if I never cash out re-fi, and hopefully at some point in the future, the biggest chunk of that will disappear. From the time I bought it to now, my PITI has been less than what renting would have cost me as well.

But ultimately I accept that I will have to make sacrifices in some areas in order to get what I want in other areas. Such as how my daily driver is a 25 year old Chevy truck, so that I could afford to stay out of debt (other than the mortgage), and be able to have the two 4x4 toys in the garage too. Chances are that I'll never know what it's like to buy a brand new car or truck.

Can I afford the tractor? Well, that's kind of part of why I posted this to begin with...can I afford to go buy a $20K brand new one? No, absolutely not. I don't have that kind of cash sitting in the bank that I don't have marked for something else at this point in time, and I'm not willing to go into debt to buy one unless it becomes an absolute need. Heck, I wouldn't even want to drop that kind of money on a truck that I'd drive every day, much less something that gets far less use. But something used around $4K-$5K? That's doable. But then it's also a matter of I wouldn't want to spend that much just because I can if it's not the right tool for the job anyways.