Relative Something

The list of tasks related to fighting back the natural growth constantly threatening to overgrow our property is getting shorter and shorter. On Sunday morning, I took the chainsaw into the woods to cut up the trees and limbs that had fallen across several of our trails. Yesterday, the tool of choice was the STIHL string trimmer to clean up the paths, some of which we haven’t been walking since they’d gotten too overgrown.

Soon after I’d made it a little way down one of those pathways we hadn’t been on, I discovered another downed tree we hadn’t noticed that would require the chainsaw.

Before

After

The two plants most often cluttering the pathways are Virginia Creeper vines and wild raspberry shoots. Less often, there will be clumps of whispy grasses that tend to resist the spinning trimmer line. Shredding the growth at ground level in the woods with the string trimmer tends to kick up a lot of moist dirt that sticks all over me.

It became a toss-up between the splattering dirt or the mosquitoes as to which was most irritating.

There are two versions of trails through our woods. One is wide enough to accommodate an ATV, which is a valuable thing to be able to do sometimes. The majority of the wide trails were already in existence when we bought the property.

The rest of the trails have intentionally been left narrow to limit them to foot traffic. We have created almost all of these pathways.

This was only the second time this growing season that I have used the trimmer to mow down the trails through the woods. I’m hoping it won’t need to happen again, as growth should begin to slow soon now that we are in the dog days of summer.

There remains some branch pruning to be done to reach my ideal of perfectly well-tended trails, but we are darn close to completing the maintenance of our walkways in the woods.

Forest bathing can soon commence without obstructions.

I suspect I don’t reap the same rewards of walking through the woods when I am wielding a loud and smelly small gas engine and wreaking havoc on a wide variety of growing plant life.

I’ll just have to take follow-up walks on all the trails after I am done, which is easy to make time for since they become somewhat irresistible when they are so thoroughly groomed.

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