Our New Toy!!!

We bought a tractor!!!

Okay, well--it's a small tractor. 

And it's yellow.

For a farm girl that grew up surrounded by green tractors, this is a big adjustment for me to make!

Oh, and this tractor doesn't pull, plow or do anything else fancy.

This little guy just chugs along in our yard and waters our grass!

During the past few years, we have tried about every type of sprinkler available--except for this one.  Frankly, it was kind of nerdy and I wasn't about to have it roaming our yard.  Instead, we bought all the other sprinklers at the store.  Some sprinklers did an okay job spraying water for a while, but then they would turn into a big piece of junk before too long.  Or, the settings were all or nothing--so we either had to spend all weekend moving sprinklers OR watering the street plus the neighbor's yard.

And while my ADD is in full-effect, let me mention that the above grass is not OUR grass! Boy, how I wish it was because our yard is so far from looking like that!  I have to admit, within a year's time of owning our house, we had a pretty good lookin' lawn. We had significantly reduced the amount of crabgrass and weeds--BUT, we still fought the Bermuda grass that came with the property.

Being a natural competitor, my husband decided he was going to get COMPLETELY rid of the Bermuda--AND make our yard look better than the professionally-landscaped house two doors down.  And this is the house that he wants to beat...The natural realist in me wants to point out that we could work our tails off and end up with a better yard.  But, their house will always kick our house's arse!

Anywho, in his quest to win the very, VERY "secret" competition with the neighbors, Justin did a bunch of research on eradicating Bermuda grass.  In addition to doing his homework, my husband befriended our local Extension Agent, invited the agent over for site-visits and also made sure he befriended the staff at our local Horticultural Services store.  Long story short, we found it was best to spray Round-Up all over our yard several times in the Fall and then install sod in the Spring...if we did that, we had a pretty good chance of getting rid of all the Bermuda. 

We sat down with a pencil and decided we would kill off the yard, live with a big ol' patch of dirt, plant grass seed in the "better" spots and then lay sod in the "trouble" spots.  Justin would finally win his competition!  Which, in my opinion, I thought our yard already looked pretty good...but a good wife always supports her husband's hobbies, right?!  For those of you who are curious, this is what our yard looked like last June.

At the time I tried my best, but I just couldn't convince Justin that our yard just really wasn't that bad!  I was all about just sitting back (ie being lazy) and letting the yard take care of itself...but who was I kidding?!  I knew that I, too, would enjoy having a super-well maintained yard :-)

Well, as life usually goes, plans changed and we didn't get all of the yard killed off because we decided we'd wait until Spring to do that.  Then, Spring came and we realized that with me becoming a Realtor and all the costs associated with doing so, we weren't going to be able to re-do our yard.

Ahhh, gotta love when plans change, eh?!  And when you're consequently stuck with half a yard of dead grass!

At this point, our yard looks horrible!  The south side of our yard is pure dirt, we're missing sections of grass by our shade garden, we have a dirt patch by the garage and the northern section of the yard is very patchy.  Granted, we DO have grass in some spots--and some pretty good grass, at that.  But, overall, our grass looks awful.  Guess that's what happens when you get the cart ahead of the horse and put down crab-grass preventer before patching in your yard!

Now, the plan is to replant and overseed our yard in the fall...in the meantime, we're trying to salvage what grass we DO have and prepare the ground for when it's time to replant.  And like the rest of the state, we have had hardly any snow or rain this year so we have to water, water, water.

And this is where our little yellow tractor saves the day!

I had always noticed the little tractor driving around the yard of old people's houses and couldn't figure out what the attraction was.  Maybe, because they were old-people, they just liked the fact that it was a tractor???  And in their world, tractors were pretty cool pieces of machinery???

Again, after doing some research, we discovered that you form a path with your yard hose, attach your tractor to the end of the hose and put the hose between the tractor wheels, then it follows your hose until it hits its end-point.  Just like that--without ever having to go out and move the sprinklers--your yard is watered!  Sign me up :-)

With that, we went to the store and bought one.  And yes, they're everything they are cracked up to be!  We are able to adjust the speed and distance of the water--and it just chugs along until it's watered the whole yard!  We never have to step out to mess with the crazy thing :-)  It's seriously about the best thing since sliced bread and I can't believe I was so apprehensive (or too vain!) to buy one.  Now that we've figured out an easy way to get our grass watered, we just have to figure out a way to remember to water our yard on a regular basis!