Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Acreage Mangement Question

Poppy, as for the neighbor's side of the fence, I'm sure you realize that you can't spray or cut his stuff down, but I think it's a generally accepted legal principle that if a neighbor's vegetation (trees, bushes, etc) cross onto your property, you are well within your rights to trim the encroaching portions so your property is clear of them. As a way of just being neighborly, you may well want to just have a friendly conversation with him one day and let him know you were thinking about doing some fence line maintenance and that you wanted to make sure he was okay with the fact that you plan to trim back his stuff where it reaches over the boundary. I have always found it's best to at least start by being friendly as it very often saves heartache later on!

On the tractor side of things, you'll no doubt get a lot of opinions. I think the answer depends a lot on what you'll be doing at your place. Part of me can see you getting a small-ish tractor (25 - 30 hp) and being just fine, though I firmly believe that you're always ahead to get the biggest you can reasonably afford. I don't know that I've ever heard someone say they bought too much tractor! In your case, you may feel that way if you buy something north of 75 horses, but you probably won't go there anyway!

At most, I suspect there's nothing you couldn't do if you had a 30 - 35 hp tractor with a good front end loader (FEL) and a 6 or 7 foot brush hog. You'll be able to to an awful lot of general grounds maintenance with that kind of power, from mowing, to stump pulling, etc. A smaller - 25 horse - tractor may struggle a little on some tasks, but again, depending on what you will realistically be doing, it may be all you'd ever need. You can always trade up later if you see that you are regularly doing tasks that outpace your tractor's capabilities.

Keep your mower for the yard area around your house and just rough cut the rest. If you want, eventually, you can get a finish mower for your tractor and even get rid of the small JD, but that wouldn't be necessary in my opinion. I have a Cub Cadet 54" garden tractor that I do all of my mowing with right now and I probably mow about 4 acres all together out of my 30 acres total. My plan is to eventually pick up a 30 - 35 horse tractor and do most of the mowing with that (plus in the future I'll be mowing a lot more of the total acreage) but will keep my CC for the yard when we build out there.

You'll get a lot feed back on tractors and you may want to search the forum as there have been some really good threads on tractors in the past year, and probably beyond.