In article ,
Nad R wrote:

If you have money to burn about $50k. How about a small compact tractor.
They can mow the lawn, can add a five foot tiller, front loader, remove the
snow, rear baggers for lawn clippings and small enough to fit in your
garage. About the size of mid size car.

Easy on the back but hard on the wallet.

You have a wallet? A little ostentatious, don't you think, or is it just
an heirloom?

Doing my gardening with newspapers, alfalfa, a pointy stick, and sweat.
Total cost $18.


"Tickle the earth with a hoe, it will laugh a harvest."
- Mary Cantell

When gas gets much higher, I will have get out my scythe.

For those with health problems a pointy stick may not do the job.
The soil is soft from having been groomed for years, so pretty much all
I have to do with the stick (old shovel handle actually) is to lean on
it some to make a hole that the seedling will go into. The newspapers
and mulch get rid of the weeds, so there is no weeding. They actually
become part of the mulch. The drip irrigation is already laid out, but I
have the occasional repair to make which is no big thing, cut, insert a
barbed connector, insert barb into new length of drip emitters, and I'm
back in business. I normally put tomato arbors over my plants to protect
them, which is just habit from when I had two young dogs that would dash
from one side of the yard to the other, heedless of prized plants. Last
year, I used clear plastic to cover the beds of the tomatoes and
peppers. This year, for the beds that don't get plastic, I covered them
with chicken wire to discourage ol' rascally raccoon. As you can see, it
isn't brute force. It's time and patience. Tractors may allow you to do
more in a shorter amount of time, but they have their maintenance too.
Where I live isn't flat. It seems that every year, some one who has been
driving tractors forever, manages to roll one down a slope. Not pretty.

If one
has a heavy duty machine like a tractor, a person in their nineties or with
disabilities can can do the job of those that are twenty years old without
disabilities. I am partial to the John Deere 4300 series.
--
- Billy
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8559254-11yearold-takes-on-genetically-modified-food-producers-video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_vN0--mHug