Zero Turn Mower and a New Bird Bath Top

The rain, coupled with warm days and cool nights, have made the grass grow like it is on steroids. Between our two houses and my son's lawn we probably mow a little over 5 acres.  Now if those 5 acres were just straight mowing it would be a breeze but they are not, so we had to do something.

Our current mowers are a 17hp 42 inch cut rider and a self propelled push mower that is a 24 inch cut.  We have a lot of trees to go around which adds time to cutting because I need to go around the tree four times to cut all the sides because the turning radius isn't very tight.  This adds time to the mowing.

Then we have the fall which gives us a bazillion leaves of which we run out of time picking up and end up spending weeks in the spring picking up wet leaves.  So when we saw a zero turn Simplicity with a triple rear bagger for sale in a yard for $1850 we slammed on the brakes and investigated.

The mower is a 2008 with only 400 hrs of non commercial use.  R worked his magic and we got it for $1750.  It was raining today so I do not have photos but it's a cutie and even has little chrome front shocks.  I gave it a quick test drive and I'll need a little practice before I get close to my hostas with the mower.

Since it was raining we decided we needed to do something that would require us to get rained on so we went to the lawn ornament store in Lennon, Michigan.  It's called Krupp's Novelty and has been in business for a long time.  Its amazing what you can buy that is made out of concrete.

My favorite was the stepping stones in the shape of the state of Michigan.  These can be bought in plain, pebbled, or pebbled with a Petoskey stone (MI state stone or fossil).

I love the sign that says you can buy the state of MI for $40.00 or the upper for $19.95.  Ahhhh....the upper peninsula is Michigan, too. This really pisses off the U P people.  It really throws people for a loop when we say U. P. which means upper peninsula.  Some people say up north but generally speaking, up north is anything north of Gaylord or basically where the big traffic jam ends every Friday night during the summer.

Unfortunately it looks like the top that we wanted for our base is no longer made.  We have two large bird baths already and two summers ago someone gave us another base to match the ones we already have in our yard.  It's a shallow bowl so the birds do not drown while taking a bath.  They love to splash and get thoroughly wet.  I always add a large flat stone for the smaller birds to land on, too. The bowl that we ended up with is deep so I will need to fill it with rocks to take up some of the depth.  No photo because it was raining pretty good by the time we found a bowl that would work with our base.  You can see the rain drops on some of the photos.  Tomorrow should be fun getting it out of the back of the truck and onto the pedestal.  #timetocalltheson

 I'll leave this last photo for your imagination.  I'm sure there is a joke there but I'll refrain.