Posts Tagged ‘hedge trimming’
Head Start
I got a head start on my next adventure by driving up to the lake place last night, a day early for the annual Golf Weekend hosted by Cyndie’s brothers, Steve and Ben. Several years ago, they started including me even though I don’t golf. Since several guys like to ride bikes in addition to their golfing, I bring my bike and let them put me through a workout of trying to keep up with them in the woods or on the road.
I’d like to use the excuse that I am getting too old for this, but they are the same age as me, so that doesn’t work.
By coming up a day early, I’m forcing myself to take a break from the groundskeeping work that never ends when 20 acres are growing at a frenetic pace.
Actually, I made great headway cleaning up the pathways and edges of trails through the woods over the last seven days. Some of the growth is beginning to take on a rather hedge-like appearance in several places around the property. That is just what I’m after.
I snuck in a few minutes of bike maintenance the other day, trying my hand at adding sealant to my tubeless tires for the very first time. I made one foolish mistake. Since I was trying to simultaneously entertain Asher, I moved my bike down by the barn, where he loves to sit in the shade of a tree and watch over his kingdom.
At that location, I didn’t have a convenient station for the bike, so I just leaned it against a barn door. I should have flipped it over, but I wasn’t thinking. When I added the sealant to the front tire after deflating it, the weight on the wheel flexed the tire, and a lot of the sealant leaked out of the bead. D’oh!
It was doubly maddening because the front tire was the one losing air faster than it should. I solved that error before doing the rear tire, and the process worked flawlessly. Luckily, the “refresh” of sealant, even though not the full amount, seems to have plugged the leak in the front tire. It’s holding pressure just as well as the rear.
Having never dealt with tubeless tires before, I was feeling a little intimidated by the whole sealant process. Now, after just one experience of adding a new amount, I see that it is not a big deal at all.
I’m going to give my tires a little road test this morning and get a head start on checking out my favorite road routes before the other riders arrive. As a bonus, I won’t be doing any mowing at all for the next few days.
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Picking Battles
The backlog of things we would like done on our property is more than we can realistically accomplish on any given day, so we step out the door with vague intentions and see what claims our attention first. The driving factor is either how fast things are growing or what tree or branch has fallen and needs to be cut up and processed.
We also need to react to whatever the weather brings and adjust our agenda accordingly. Yesterday, the wildfire smoke was annoying, and the high dew point temperature made things a sweaty mess, but since there was no rain, we chose to cut and trim mid-summer growth.
Cyndie took the battery-powered string trimmer down to the labyrinth, and I headed for the north loop trail with the hedge trimmer and a rake.
My goal was to create a smooth wall of foliage along the trail marking the northern edge of our property. There is a rusty old barbed wire fence just inside all that growth.
I think it looks better as a hedge wall.
While I was working, I received a call from Cyndie. She needed my help with the trimmer because the line broke off inside the spool. I told her I would be right down.
When I got to the labyrinth, she wasn’t there. I called her back, and she told me she had gone up to the shop.
If there are two different ways to do something, we will always choose the opposite of one another.
As the afternoon wore on, I finished mowing down by the road and around the house. I found Cyndie disassembling our broken kitchen compost bin so we could put the pieces in the trash before it gets picked up this morning. A replacement bin is on order.
I finished trimming along the north loop trail and mowed along the edge of several trails. They will all need to be raked as a result. This time of year, if we don’t deal with the rampant growth along the sides of our trails, tall weeds, and grasses droop over and almost make the pathways impassable.
At one point during the hot afternoon, I caught a glimpse of the horses hanging out under the shade sail. That was one of the highlights of my day.
Today, I get to choose between mowing the labyrinth, trimming under the fence line around the back pasture, using the hedge trimmer on the last length of the north loop trail, using the string trimmer on the trails through the woods, or using the chainsaw to cut up the large limb of the oak tree that is still laying across one of our trails.
If I don’t feel like picking any of those, I could always rake the clippings off the trails where I mowed the edges yesterday. With how fast everything grows, if we don’t tend to some part of it every day, it just gets harder to keep up with the groundskeeping tasks.
It seems like a lot of work –and it is– but it’s a labor of LOVE!
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Hedge Wall
When we get home from the lake on a Monday and depart the following Thursday for our friends’ lake cabin, it doesn’t leave me much time in my role as Head Groundskeeper. Making things even more complicated, another rain shower cut into the limited hours available for mowing. The trail I’ve been wanting to trim has escaped attention for longer than I hoped so far this summer.
Yesterday, while waiting for the morning dew to dry so I could mow, I grabbed the hedge trimmer and tackled as much as I could before lunch.
It doesn’t stand out much in that photo, but I was working the right side of the path to achieve a clean hedge wall out of the wild growth along our property border with the neighboring farm field. It’ll look great once I finish the full length.
This is the second summer that I have been working to shape that tangle of scrub trees into a clean natural barrier. I thought it would be a little easier the second time around, but things have grown fast and thick with all the precipitation we’ve received this summer.
I hope to make enough progress this morning to finish the north loop trail all the way to the road before time runs out and we leave for Mike and Barb’s lake place which is a 4-hour drive away.
Squeezing in a few long days of landscape work is worth the extra effort to get the payoff of another weekend of lake fun, especially with friends we will be traveling with come fall. The four of us are planning a visit to Iceland in September.
For a guy who isn’t all that fond of travel, I sure have been spending a lot of time away from home lately. When we get home from the lake this weekend, I’ll only have a few days before heading up for a weekend of biking in Hayward.
Maybe I can spend a few extra days at home during August. One of my great pleasures in life is having nowhere I need to go. I am an exception to the norm of people retiring with hopes of traveling the world.
I much prefer being in my own home more often than not.
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Relative Something 