I actually love my two acre yard. If I had a smaller one, I couldn't have 21 garden beds and I grow 90% of the vegetables and fruits we eat in a year.
Can you clarify what your property mix is, in terms of lawn/house/garden/etc?
There's a big difference between, say, 2 acres with a few thousand square feet of lawn over the septic field, and 2 acres with a house in the center and the rest maintained turf. I don't have a good feel for what your space is, though the 21 garden beds would imply there's a lot of "not-exactly-grass" around, which would make a large riding mower a challenge to use.
I'm going to suggest goats or geese. Since we got geeae 12 months ago I've used my mower once.
Is this because they keep the grass trimmed, or because you used it once, and the geese were such royal pains in the rear (literally) that you haven't gone out with the mower again? My impression of a goose is that it's a pissed off device for spreading watery goose crap all over
everything and biting anything moving that comes near it.
Do you maintain your own mower? Thoughts on that? My dad is anti-Craftsman lawn mower, (pro John Deere and Torro) so I've grown up with that mindset and my dad has also convinced my spouse that Craftsman lawn mowers are inferior. I will need solid arguing points to go up against that view.
At this point, a depressingly large number of the home equipment brands are just different lines of the same company. Check into it, but I think Craftsman and Troy-Bilt are the same, I'm pretty sure Cub Cadet is in there, and I'm sure there are a few more that are literally just the same thing with different motors and different paint. Differentiated by random features that may or may not matter.
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I like my lawn tools as much as the next guy, but I'm more inclined to get old stuff and fix it/maintain it. My tractor is 75 years old (handles snow removal, driveway maintenance, and dirt work), I've got maybe $2000 into it so far, and it needs new rubber next year (so probably another $1000-ish), but then should last decades with minimal work.
I don't have that much lawn to mow, so I deal with a normal walk behind gas mower - the lawn turns our septic field into mulch material fairly efficiently.
And the rest of the property is cheatgrass, which I deal with (poorly) with a 30 year old walk behind DR trimmer (big weedeater on wheels). Plus I've got a smaller trimmer and chainsaw for dealing with the wood piles (there were a bunch of dead trees we had to pull down to get the house in, and I'm slowly turning them into firewood for my inlaws).
It really comes down to what the property is, and what you need to maintain it. I certainly go against the standard grain here in terms of property equipment, but we have 2 acres and are somewhat responsible for a bunch on either side of that (we live on a chunk of my inlaws property and share responsibility for a lot of it - I maintain the tractor, but my father in law uses it for driveway maintenance, the DR trimmer is his old unit I've restored to function, etc).
But, in general, I do think a $4k mower is a bit overkill unless it's a good power unit with a snowblower and some other attachments as well.