The client wants the yard looking clean by the afternoon: the lawn needs clearing after winter, brush needs collecting, the driveway needs sweeping, and everything has to be hauled out through a gate at the back. With a van loaded with separate attachments, every task becomes its own trip. The problem isn't the work — it's how many different machines you need to get it done and how much time you spend loading and unloading them.
Tracked vs. wheeled machines in yards
A wheeled machine gets into yards when the ground is dry and firm. As soon as it rains, or right after the lawn has been irrigated, the wheels sink and leave ruts that the client will point out. A tracked machine distributes weight over a wider surface: you can work on wet grass, uneven ground, and slopes without the risk of having to go back and repair the surface.
Wheeled machines remain useful on hard surfaces — asphalt, gravel, paved areas — where rubber tracks don't cause damage either, but a wheeled machine moves faster. If the work is almost always on paved surfaces, wheeled is fine. If you're regularly on natural ground, tracked is the choice that stops you from having to wait for the right day to work.
The problem of swapping attachments between tasks
A professional landscaper rarely does just one thing at a jobsite. They cut, collect, haul, and sweep. If every task requires a different machine, purchase costs, storage costs, and transport costs all multiply. The solution that has gained ground in recent years is the multi-purpose machine: a single tracked undercarriage that carries interchangeable attachments, hitched and unhitched on the jobsite without tools. You mulch the lawn edge, switch to the sweeper for the driveway, then load the skip to haul out the brush — all with the same machine, at the same jobsite, on the same day.
Which attachments actually matter for landscaping
A blade or hammer mulcher reduces brush, pruning debris, and scrub directly on site, cutting down the volume that needs to be hauled away. It's the operation that saves the most time when dealing with large quantities of light material.
A sweeper with a collection hopper cleans driveways, patios, and paved areas, picking up leaves, soil, and fine gravel. Unlike a blower, it collects instead of displacing: material goes straight into a container and doesn't need a second pass.
Forks and rake grapples are used to load bulky material — logs, branches, bundles of brush — without picking it up by hand. Paired with a tipping or rotating skip, they eliminate back-and-forth trips on foot through the yard.
In the Cormidi lineup
The CMF multi-purpose machines are built for this type of work: same tracked undercarriage, a universal tool plate that accepts a blade mulcher, hammer mulcher, sweeper with collection hopper, forks, rake grapple, rotating timber grapple, high-capacity bucket, and tipping or rotating skip. Attachments are swapped at the jobsite, without going back to the shop. The operator platform lets you ride on board during travel, which is useful when the distances to cover are long.
For those working in even tighter spaces or needing to lift material to greater heights, the mini skid loaders CLX1500 and C85-ML use the same universal tool plate and accept most of the same attachments. These are more compact machines, designed for passageways where even a CMF has trouble maneuvering.
For a closer look at how these machines work in real landscaping jobsites, the article Tracked dumpers for landscapers: where they pay off covers the most common use cases.
What to check before choosing
Before deciding, it's worth measuring the narrowest passageways at the jobsites you visit most often: gates, gaps between hedges, side passages. Then think about how many different tasks you average per jobsite in a day, and what type of ground you work on most. With those three pieces of information in hand, your local dealer can point you to the undercarriage and attachments that genuinely cover your workload — without over-specifying and without leaving any gaps.
