Fall has barely set in at BangShift Mid-West, but you wouldn’t know it by stepping outside. Almost overnight, temperatures in the 90s and bright sun have been displaced with much cooler temperatures and rain..and more rain. We aren’t quite to the point of the yard gaining small ponds like normal, but we aren’t far from it, either. And that’s a shame, because it means that I’m going to have to wait for a few dry days before I mow the jungle I call a yard down…and that’s probably going to be a couple of weeks, at least. You see, neither one of the two John Deere mowers I use on my lawn are suited well for mudding purposes. One is on it’s last legs and I’m just waiting for it’s engine to give up in one great big cloudy puff of blue, oily smoke, and the other is a sub-compact tractor that’ll sink in sections of my yard. And that’s no exaggeration…last year, I got to enjoy the view of my neighbor’s truck as it was buried to the framerails in his backyard.

Mudding a lawn mower goes against just about every design philosophy that the engineers drew lawn tractors up with. You are supposed to mow down easy grass, not find a deep, sloshy puddle with a bit of gooey mud at the bottom and take aim. We suggest that you find a cheap Craigslist mower if you are going to try to do this at home. Pretty sure you won’t survive the argument as you explain to the significant other what happened to the mower that was in the garage.