LEARN FROM ALL OF MY TRIES

IN PRAISE OF MACHINES THAT REFUSE TO DIE

As a property owner with a several driveways there are a few things I am always experimenting to improve: namely plowing snow and cutting grass.

After 30 years of trying everything, one machine refused to die.

We have lived on the Sans Souci property for three decades and have experimented endlessly with everything short of robots for both. The snowing need is infrequent (and can usually be handled with a couple hours of shoveling) but was addressed with plows on trucks, tractors and ATVs… a costly snowblower and contracting expensive services. This year we finally landed on a reliable plow on the Polaris Ranger.

Grass cutting, on the other hand, has been a tricky cat to skin. For many years I did it myself with the riding mower from the 1960s that I inherited when we bought the farm. Starting it was harder than Chinese Algebra and, when it was on its last legs I attended my first auction at Bonnie Brae and severely overpaid for something called a skag.

You stand on a skag on a wheeled platform that follows a massive cutting machine around at race car speeds shaking your bones apart so by the end they’re just floating around inside your body. After that I bought a brand new John Deere tractor, with a plow, but like the old rusty tractor that came with the place it took forever.

In those days, by the time I finished all of the cutting including time consuming weed-whacking with just as many experimental string trimmers I was always close to nine hours in… pretty much a full Saturday or Sunday. Now I may not be the sharpest Ginsu in the set but that seemed like a colossal waste of time and impossible when I was committed to coaching baseball or lacrosse.

So it was that hiring the job out came to make the most sense. When 3–5 landscapers roll up on professional machines my 9 hours are cut to under 2.

The problem with that scenario is that it wasn’t perfect for a long time. They would complain about having to get off of their mowers to move pool furniture, cut areas I wanted to let grow and generally just not care exactly as much about the property as I did.

So, with a health issue keeping me from running or riding as much and no kids at home, I took over mowing once again. Not only can I get things exactly as I want them to look, I have created rotating meadows so it isn’t ever all cut at once. That saves time. So does cycling through the job by sections. It’s never all cut at once but that doesn’t matter and is complementary to the permaculture ethos.

I only need to somehow modify my string trimmer so that I can walk after using it for any extended period of time. Apparently it was made for landscapers under five feet tall and destroys my back but some farm engineering, something every project requires and something I have become quite adept at, will solve it.

But the real reason I am writing this is to extol the virtues of a different machine…

Throughout our 30 years we have oscillated between landscaping companies and different solutions… the tractors, the skag, and several landscaping companies. I even had to rent a mower once because I fired the crew and didn’t own one. That was when I bought the Yazoo-Kees.

I went to the local John Deere dealer (Prizer’s, now Little’s) where I had earlier purchased the riding mower fully expecting to pick up a new zero-turn John Deere. These things are not inexpensive but, as we all know, nothing runs like a Deere.

However, the dealership was carrying a brand I never heard of that cost less and was primarily used in commercial applications. I had never heard of a Yazoo-Kees (I originally thought it was some weird partnership between Yamaha and Kawasaki) but later learned they have been around since 1874 (almost as long as John Deere).

Who cares! What the hell is he talking about!? Do you think anyone actually gives a fig about how you plow your driveway or what kind of lawnmower you bought in 2005? Probably not but…

My Yazoo-Kees zero turn deserves to have an epic poem written about it!

It’s like the fabled steed of Ulysses S. Grant, Wyatt Earp’s favorite six-shooter, or King Arthur’s Excalibur except I haven’t treated it nearly as heroically.

I am not certain I bought it in 2005 but I have had it a long time and twenty years seems about right and perfectly acceptable for this story.

The Yazoo-Kees is almost literally a war horse. I beat the hell out of it on my property every year just keeping up with the regular mowing but then, sometimes I will also cut sections of the high fields. It gets clogged and covered with grass but chugs through despite the thickness of the brush.

I remember an older neighbor once telling me he bought an air compressor so that he could blow off his mower after each use. That is not me. I put the Yazoo-Kees away covered in grass, hay, twigs and branches after each mowing. At the end of the season I don’t clean it, or prepare it for next year in any way. I have never changed the oil. In all the time I mowed it I have removed the deck and sharpened the blades exactly once. But it never fails me.

That was until this year when it wouldn’t start.

Recently a grounds crew had been cutting the grass at our home and doing a fantastic job but they had some staffing issues so I took over once again this year. With all of the extra work I am doing on the orchard and gardens it’s a natural extension and it’s not taking as long since I cycle through areas so not a complete hardship. Plus I am saving some money that we can spend on trees!

Anyway, this year it would not even turn over which was highly unusual. This mower had always been a beast, always firing up in the spring after sitting in a cold barn all winter long. With the help of friends I was able to troubleshoot and replace the solenoid and BAM, the little tank is rampaging once again.

As I said, the Yazoo-Kees zero turn deserves to have an epic poem written about it, but not just because it starts up and mows every spring.

I often use it more as a brush hog than a mower and, with the various rather simple settings I am able to quickly and effectively transition between coarse shaping to fine tuning. The Yazoo-Kees does it all.

When I coached baseball practice fields were at a premium. This was when my now 30-year-old son was in coach-pitch Little League. I can only imagine how it is now with many more athletes and the same number of fields. Rather than fighting for field space and getting the worst of the draw because we were a younger team we got proactive. I had the space and the Yazoo-Kees so I built a field. The league gave me a beat up old backstop and we built benches and an equipment box behind it. The mower cut the outfield to a near MLB spec and, after filling in a few groundhog holes, we built a pitcher’s mound and base paths and had practices. Parents could sit in the shade of our grove to watch and their little leaguers improve on what is now Zone 1 of our orchard. We found several torn up balls when we were planting fruit trees last fall and recalled getting out on the mower to prepare the field prior to each practice.

My son transitioned from baseball to lacrosse when he was 13 or so, so around 2009 or so, and very similarly there are not as many fields as there are teams that need them. The off-camber slope of the field was less a problem with baseball where we kind of hit uphill on a 2–3º slope but with a full size lacrosse field courtesy of the Yazoo-Kees the slope ran width-wise. In the end the slope and unevenness of practicing on a farm field made our players ready for anything.

When we started learning about bicycle racing the Yazoo-Kees cut a grass track where sizable groups of mostly adult cyclocross cyclists (and my young daughter) raced shoulder to shoulder at speeds that could be terrifying around a kidney shaped course. Once that track was heavily used it became dirt but we grew the enterprise to include mountain bike obstacles and some single track through the woods. I will be the first to admit I often took the Yazoo-Kees places it should not have been going with the blades spinning but that’s exactly why it deserves memorializing.

I borrowed my neighbor Maureen’s trailer to transport the Yazoo-Kees to Phoenixville’s Reservoir Park when the disc golf course I designed was being realized. There I had it in some precarious positions, near literal cliffs and sliding down hills, but I never flipped it and REZ PRK Disc Golf Course was built out with little else.

I also trailered it over to Pennhurst when I designed and blazed the perimeter nature trail in the wooded part of Independence Park, the Indy Trail. Here it got very narrow, rooty and rocky but the trail was completed mostly thanks to the Yazoo-Kees. In that same park we helped to define a radio controlled airfield for model plane enthusiasts and the Yazoo-Kees first cut the tall grass and kept it short in the first year. It was there that the grass guide finally fell off and the leader of the project bought me a new one online. After years of slamming into trees, curbs and rocks, that was the first part ever replaced.

Have I nearly flipped it over backwards ascending steep inclines? Have I almost flipped it sideways on off-camber hills? Have I shot out sticks the size of fireplace logs like missiles? Have we hit rocks, metal, dog toys, lacrosse balls and hoses? Does a frog bump his ass when he hops?

And now, in 2026, the Yazoo-Kees is back at it, logging 10–12 hours a week. I do need to sharpen the blades, add oil, clean it up a bit and thank it for its service in a little ceremony but this machine is nothing if unceremonious.

I remember back to the early days of Sans Souci, some perfect spring when the kids were young and spent their days playing in the freshly mowed lawn, I needed a mower and I got excited that the Yazoo-Kees came with a cup holder. I learned on the first mow that a beer will stay in there for less than 2 minutes or 200 feet of mowing but everything else about the Yazoo-Kees has paid for itself over and over and over again.

No one has heard of Yazoo-Kees, except the repairman who is always booked out for months when I call, which is exactly why the mower is never serviced. Perhaps now, with this memorial, they’ll understand the epic poetry of this machine. Because I’ve never treated it like a legend… and it became one anyway.

STAY CURIOUS.