Mowing
I know… not a project. Except, here at Grandview, it absolutely is. We’re going deep here. From cutting deck height to obstacle removal to route planning… congrats: you get to vicariously live through my summer as I did everything wrong and learned it all the hard way.
Learning the Machine
The first thing I had to do was learn how to operate the machine. I’ve never owned a zero-turn before. As far as mowers go, I’ve actually only owned a little push-mower - also a Toro, actually. I let it sit in the heat of an unconditioned Florida garage for a couple years with a half-tank of un-stabilized gas, though, and it never ran quite right again no matter how many times it was serviced. Lesson learned.
I’d pretend that I read the manual cover-to-cover before hopping on this thing, but this entire project is rooted in values like honesty so I’m not going to. Instead I’ll be honest and admit that I didn’t read a damn thing, I just filled it up with gas, hopped on, and got mowing. As far as machine operation goes, that went surprisingly well, and kudos to Toro for that.
The little control pad is simple enough; there’s an ignition key, a choke pull, a throttle control, and a mower engagement switch. Four controls. Every one of them feels a little flimsy, but that’s par for the course for homeowner grade equipment in general. Nothing on that panel has broken, and I’m writing this as I pack the machine away for the season, so it seems to be sturdy enough.
Fortunately, while this style of mower is new to me, I do have some experience operating equipment with similar drivetrains, at least conceptually. I used to run ship docking tugboats out of the port of Jacksonville, believe it or not. Feels like an entirely different lifetime. In that line of work, I trained on what are called “Z-Drive” tugs, which have twin azimuthing drive units under the hull instead of traditional propellers bolted to driveshafts. To control them, your hands rest on two control units that look a little it like joysticks. Spin them around and the propellers spin around. Push forward or backwards and the clutches and throttles engage and respond in-kind.
The Toro control principles are surprisingly similar. The motor runs a serpentine belt that powers two little hydraulic drive units - one for each wheel. Each of the two control arms engages its respective clutch and controls the throttle. It’s honestly really simple and intuitive.
Next we’ve got the mowing deck. The 54” has a welded deck, which feels a lot sturdier than the lighter weight press molded ones. The deck hangs off of four short chains, and the front two chains hang off a linkage arm that adjusts the deck height via a foot pedal. The height is set by articulating the foot pedal and setting a metal pin at the desired height. Simple enough.
Setting the Deck Height
I started with optimism and some YouTube research, and ended up setting the cutting deck at three inches. That seemed about right, I thought. The result was a patchy network of scalped and sunburned sections surrounded by neatly trimmed areas. Some parts of the yard performed great at 3”, but most didn’t like it. Also the sheer size of the 54” mowing deck means that any angle on the machine is reflected in the angle of the cut. 3” means less than 3” on anything other than a flat lawn. A week later and with a bruised ego, I came back at 4”. That solved the problems, but the lawn looked messy. By the end of the first month, I’d dialed it in: three and a half inches. Cleared most of the rocks and roots, but still looked neat and healthy.
That should’ve been the end of it. But then came the scalping - those wallet-shaking moments when the deck slammed into a high point and sliced the grass down to its roots, or threw sparks as the blades attacked an unsuspecting rock. That’s when I discovered the importance of anti-scalp wheels and learned how to adjust them properly. Once dialed in, the Toro finally started floating instead of attacking the ground.
Mapping the Land
It didn’t take long to learn that mowing Grandview was going to be a little more complicated than I had expected. It felt like mowing four entirely separate properties - each with it’s own topography, conditions, and challenges. Clearly, I had to learn the land. I began intuitively dividing the property into four distinct zones and learning the details and requirements of each of them.
Upper Field – The pine field. Beautiful, but impossible. Thick with roots undulating above the topsoil, uneven, shaded. Overgrown garden beds along the perimeter. Grass grows in patchy tufts, and the mower bucks like a bronco over every hidden rise. No easy access from the garage without cruising down the road to get there. I’ve learned to pick careful paths, go slow, and manipulate the cutting deck with the foot pedal as I’m mowing. In a few areas - the worst of them - I just steer wide and come back with a weedwhacker. The key for this section is to go slow.
Main Yard – The showpiece. Rolling and open, with soft lines and clean passes. You see it out of most windows in the house. This is where I practice pattern work — diagonal sweeps, alternating angles, clean borders around the gardens. The mower feels at home here. There is one area where the foundation drains terminate, about a hundred feed south of the house and right in the middle of the field, and when that gets wet, the area around it gets very soft. HOW wet determines the approach. A little wet and I can mow carefully. More than a little wet and I come back and “mow” with the weedwhacker. A lightweight push mower would be perfect for this, and for a few other tricky sections of the property, but I don’t have one.
Side Field – The easy one. Flat, high and dry, and forgiving. I can mow this section on autopilot, headphones in, full speed ahead, brain off. It’s the field I save for last, or for the days I’m tired of fighting with this place.
Lower Field – The nightmare and the teacher. Long slopes, boggy patches, buried rocks. In dry weather, the Toro glides like a sled. After rain, it sinks to its axles. I learned to mow this one sideways, feathering the controls, letting the back tires drift to keep from tipping. The rocks are another story — dozens of them, each just tall enough to clip the blades. I know every one by memory now, and I’m already on my second set of blades because of them.
Each field takes roughly an hour to mow, and I’ve learned not to push past two sections per day. That rhythm keeps both the operator and the machine sane.
Ground Conditions
This one’s pretty embarrassing, but again, in the spirit of the project I’m going to publicly own up to it. I massively underestimated how important ground saturation would be. I’ve mowed wet grass before, I’ve mowed dry grass, and I’ve mowed grass at every stage in between. But never anything like this. I don’t know if the root cause is the soil composition, the topography, or the machine, but you cannot (and let me emphasize… CANNOT) mow this property when it is wet. At least not with this machine. You can mow the upper fields, but that’s it. In a number of different low spots and completely random other areas, when the ground is wet, the machine sinks down into the deck in no time flat. And on any kind of slope greater than a few degrees, high moisture means the mower won’t have traction, will slide across the grass, and with too much control input will rip trenches and grass strips out on the way. I can’t mow the same day that it rains, and if there has been regular rain, I need to wait two or three days after a rain before I hit the the more… topographically challenged… areas. It took me a few mows to figure out just what conditions were required to mow the various sections of the property, and I caused some damage in the process. Next season, I’m going to buy a tow-behind water-filled roller drum and flatten out some of the areas that I turned into accidental pump tracks.
Summary
Overall, this has been a productive summer on the machine. I have learned so much more about mowing than I thought would ever be necessary, and have come to appreciate the capabilities and drawbacks of the mower, the property, and myself. I’ve winched it out of the tall grass twice, replaced a slipped drive belt, replaced and sharpened the blades, and plenty more. As I get ready to put it away for winter, I’ll take on the annual maintenance and will plan to make a post here about that. I’ll stabilize any fuel in the tank, top off fluids, and shove the thing in the corner of the garage to hibernate until spring.
When I first fired up the Toro, I thought I was just mowing the lawn. But it turned out to be a little more complicated. I had to learn the property; its moods, its limits, and my own. This old land has a personality. It can be forgiving one day and vindictive the next. It rewards patience, timing, and a light touch, and it punishes arrogance instantly. I used to think mowing was maintenance; now I see it as communication. Every pass across this place teaches me something new — about drainage, traction, timing, or just humility. The machine did make the job easier, but not in the ways I thought it would. But by the end of the season, I can honestly say I’ve earned a little fluency here. The land and I understand each other better now. Come spring, we’ll start again — both of us a little wiser, and both of us, hopefully, ready to grow.
The Project
This is not the first home I have owned. And what I mean when I say that is that I know how to mow a lawn. When we bought this place, I knew that the mowing burden was significant… it was a lot more land than I have owned before… but it didn’t seem like anything I couldn’t handle. It just looked like a lot of grass. I figured I’d go buy a big, fast, powerful mower and that’d be that. I figured I’d spend my Saturday mornings out there and then be kicking back with a beer by lunch.
Looking back, I may have been a bit naive.
What started as “just mowing the lawn” ultimately turned into a months-long experiment in machine control, terrain management, patience, and most importantly education. The property is huge — fields, slopes, pine roots, wet spots — all of it different, all of it temperamental. Mowing here isn’t a chore. It’s a lifestyle.
When I brought home the Toro TimeCutter MAX 54” zero-turn, the idea was that the machine would make the job easier. And it certainly does. But it’s not exactly the one-size-fits-all machine that I ignorantly thought it would be. Hands down, though, for the operations this machine was built for, there is nothing better.
