"Richard Oldfield" wrote in message
...
Sorry if this is off topic, it's not that far off though!

I manage about 2 acres of garden and a 12 acre field with a John
Deere LTR180 lawn tractor, 17hp, 42" cut with a nice little
trailer - I like it, it's good at what it was designed to do.

But I'd like a flail mower, a rotavator and a blade to flatten the
soil however because my tractor doesn't have a PTO or a 3 point
hitch my choice is very limited.

Before I upgrade to a more expensive machine it occured to me
somebody must have been through this problem before - did you buy
bits to upgrade / customise your small John Deere or think it
through, explore lots of avenues and finally have to go shopping for
a new tractor?


With your John Deere you're probably going to be stuck with the kind
of trailed tools sold for use with ATVs etc, very limited capabilities
and not that cheap. A modern compact tractor will give you much
greater versatility and better implements. A good dealer will probably
be able to get you a good used machine, but do remember that your
implements will cost you several times more than the tractor itself if
you want to do a wide range of tasks. Having said that I wouldn't want
to go back to running a big garden without compact tractors. The most
useful for general gardening are around 15-25 hp and they would be
capable of doing pretty well anything you need. For a flail you'd
probably need to be near the high end of that range especially if you
wanted it to collect as well - a flail collector is a bit heavy for
the smaller machines.
--
Rod

My real address is rodthegardeneratmyisp