Recommendations for Ride-on Lawnmower (lawn, landscaping, growing, lawn mower)
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I've recently purchased a property in New Jersey, and i need to get myself a ride on lawn mower. The property has maybe 2 acres of lawn, which are currently mowed weekly by a landscaping service, and a further field of 5 acres, which as the moment has gone pretty wild, with coarse growth up to about waist height. Both the lawn and the field have some pretty steep slopes.
I really want to take over the mowing of all of this...the 2 acres of lawn i plan to mow once a week, and the 5 acre field id probably only want to tackle once every month during growing months.
I'd also quite like the facility to add a snowblower, and possible some kind of lawn finisher (to add those stripes!). These might be later purchases.
I CERTAINLY don't want to be spending over $10k on the purchase. I've been looking at John Deere riding tractors, mainly the X700 and X500 series. Anyone have any experience of these, and whether they would be up to the work ive described? Any other makes/models i should be researching? Any other general advice on this purchase people could offer?
I should add, im totally new to the riding tractor game, and im entirely non-mechanically minded, so easy of use and reliability are MUSTS!
In our 34 years of marriage and home ownership we have had 3 John Deer ride on lawnmowers. Our present one has duct tape holding the seat together but only because it was left outside once when the battery died and the seat was torn. Our needs are not like yours but our John Deere have been reliable and do the job just fine. I don't think DH would consider anything other than a John Deere as he grew up on a farm and that was what he grew up with on a much larger scale.
I have to admit we didn't need newer ones but DH wanted to give one to a realtive and another time he wanted more bells and whistles.