Posts Tagged ‘trimming trails’
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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Reclaiming Trails
Counting down the days until my next Tour of Minnesota adventure, I popped out for a 2-hour loop on local roads for a 25-mile bike ride yesterday morning. Picking a route with roads I’ve not ridden before, I found myself climbing a curvy road that rose skyward to such a degree I needed to walk my bike up a good portion of it. This had me wondering if I’d made a mistake in doing my Monday morning exercise routine before asking my legs to work so hard on a ride.
The highlight of this ride was discovering an old man seated on his walker on the side of the road a long way from any buildings. What caught my eye at first was a couple of fine-looking cats that seemed out of place in the middle of nowhere. As the road I was on ended at this crossroad, my mind was contemplating which direction I wanted to turn when I finally noticed Mr. Meyer facing to my left, looking oblivious to my arrival.
I offered a greeting and rolled up beside him to chat. The cats were his and followed him on his walks. He told me he was 93 and this was the spot where he turns around after resting for a spell. We had a wonderful visit until both of us felt a need to get moving again before stiffening up.
Limiting myself to just two hours of riding got me home in time to join Cyndie in tackling a few chores on the property. First, I pulled out the chainsaw and we removed recently tipped trees that were leaning precariously across two different trails. From there, I switched to the power trimmer to whack a trail from the jungle of overgrowth taking over while Cyndie used our ratcheted lopper to cut back encroaching trees and branches.
It is very rewarding to reclaim space from the relentless growth that overtakes our trails this time of year. It seems to get easier each time since what needs cutting is all new growth, not well-established thick-stemmed plants that foil the string trimmer.
I made my way through two tanks of gas in the trimmer, moving on to work along the back pasture fence line and around the footbridge over the drainage ditch before going as far as I could up one of the narrow internal trails.
We’ve barely covered a fraction of the trimming that needs to be done so this project will be ongoing for multiple days. We’d like to get all the fence lines cleared because the guy who cuts and bales our hay field is planning to come as soon as he gets all his own fields tended. It makes it easier for him to cut close if the fence is clearly visible.
That was plenty of exercise for one day. I may take advantage of the predicted rain due this morning to do a little shopping before departing for the Tour on Saturday. It’s time to pull out all my camping gear and take inventory. I haven’t used any of it since last year’s Tour. Hope I remember where I put everything.
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Happy Grazing
Late yesterday, Cyndie captured some great shots of the horses out on the big field as the sun was low.
Mix was walking around with only one fly sock on.
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It was nice to see Mix out there with the others because she has been lingering back under the overhang for a few days whenever the others wandered out. It’s difficult to gauge her reasons so our concern rises a little bit and we watch for any indication it is health-related.
Maybe she just doesn’t want to venture very far in the heat of the day.
The other possibility might be the low value of grazing that is available during the increasingly troublesome drought.
I wondered if she just didn’t feel like walking that far, so I’m very happy to know there doesn’t appear to be any physical limitation keeping her from moving out there.
I ended the day doing some trimming along the back pasture fence line and by the time I stopped, I didn’t feel like walking any further than necessary.
We are prone to repeating an old phrase around our house with respect to how our feet feel at the end of a long day: “My dogs were barking.”
After getting covered in dog shit shrapnel from the power trimmer upon inadvertently hitting a poo Delilah had previously deposited, I had a strong interest in doing just enough walking to get myself into a shower as fast as possible.
Living a privileged country life isn’t always a glamorous endeavor.
At least our horses maintain a pretty respectable sense of decorum when they are out grazing on the big field by the road.
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Trimming Trail
Our property has been getting spruced up in preparation for a workshop Cyndie is hosting today. In the middle of my workday yesterday, I received a message from Cyndie that there was a tree leaning across one of our trails that she wanted me to clear when I got home.
Oh, yeah. I remember neglecting to take care of that for the last three weeks.
The tree was actually small enough that I decided to use a hand saw to bring it down the rest of the way. It just took enough forethought to finally have a saw in my possession when I walked deep into the woods.
The walk to get there was difficult enough through areas of the trail that were getting overgrown that I switched tools after the trees and branches were dispatched and got to work with the Stihl trimmer.
It brought to mind that moment six years ago when I was shopping for that trimmer with very limited knowledge about what I wanted to buy. I suddenly realized that I had lucked into a salesperson at the hardware store who was less into selling and more into how things worked.
I was talking to the mechanic who fixes equipment, not some kid who works the cash register and helps people find things in the store. I remember telling the guy about the property we recently moved to and how that quickly led him to the size trimmer we should have. I took his word for it.
He said we would be able to run this motor full speed all day long and it wouldn’t suffer one bit. I didn’t imagine we would ever need to push a tool that hard.
Now, when we spend hours upon hours running that trimmer at full tilt, I understand where that mechanic was coming from. He steered me to the right machine for our needs.
When it was new, that guard piece was bright orange. Not so much anymore.
As too often happens, I was within about ten yards of the end of one trail when the trimmer engine ran out of fuel. I took a break for dinner.
It’s not easy to discern the vast level of improvement in this shot of one section I completed, but after Cyndie and Delilah took a walk toward the end of the day, I received a pretty good rating about the freshly cleared pathways.
I’ll take that as a win.
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Canine Assistant
It’s cute, really, the way she tries to help me. Some days our dog, Delilah, will appear to make a very conscious effort to participate in the task in which I am engaged. Her participation is usually counter productive, but there was a moment yesterday when she was right on the money with her support to me.
It wasn’t happening when I started the day, tending to our composting manure piles. As I dug down to the base layer in a couple of areas, I kept pulling up sticks that were in that location from before we started dumping there. I pull them out and toss them into the woods. Unfortunately, Delilah’s version of helping was to retrieve those sticks and bring them out into the grassy area so I could hit them with the lawn mower next time I mow.
After the manure pile, we headed down into the woods to put in more time clearing trails. Delilah ran all over the place in excitement over being in the woods. For a while, I figured I had lost her to the neighbor’s property, but she wasn’t gone long and came racing back to me when she did return. Apparently she had been off trying to remove all the burrs from the plants in the woods. What a wonderful helper.
She laid down right beneath where I was working. Normally, I would be extremely pleased to have her lying nearby while I work, but in this case, I was sawing a tangled mess of a tree that was about to crash down in some unpredictable manner. I tried tossing a stick into the woods. That trick worked wonders, earlier.
This time, instead of carrying the stick off to someplace nearby, she returned to lay directly beneath the hazardous branch.
I took a break from sawing and moved up the trail to trim branches with a pruner. I came upon a spot with a fair amount of common buckthorn, which is an invasive that I passionately strive to remove. When possible, I pull them up by the roots. As I tugged on one and the dirt began to give way, Delilah jumped in to help, clamping the little tree in her jaws and pulling along with me.
Finally, her effort to assist me was right on. It seems that she wants that buckthorn out just as bad as I do.
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Relative Something 