Rants from the Hollow

For someone who thinks that suburban lawns are a silly and wastefully affectation, I take far too much pleasure in nuking brush with a tractor. It comes down to this: as far as woods are concerned, I like that freshly grazed look. Lacking cows, goats, horses, or sheep, the only remaining choice is diesel.

When we first bought Heiser Hollow in ‘71, it hadn’t been lived in for a couple decades, and most of the flat parts were jungle like. We could get part way up the drive, but beyond that, it was a wall of weeds. My folks bought a scythe at the hardware store in Killbuck (another victim of Walmart), and started at it. They actually made quite a bit of progress, getting as far as the woods, where we camped in pup tents the first time we stayed overnight.

Then my dad either got smart, or totally frustrated, hiring a young farmer up the valley to come in with a vintage Fordson and a bush hog. Bush hog is a generic name for a heavy-duty mower that attaches to a 3-point hitch, allowing you to power it, and raise & lower it. It doesn’t mow lawn flat–for that you need an attachment that sits under the center of the tractor. What it does is mow hard, chopping up grass, weeds, saplings, ant hills, and anything else that gets in its way. Tractors are heavy and have sturdy wheels that crunch up bushes and sticks. Small trees fall prey to the loader bucket, or the chassis, and get chopped up by the bush hog. Logs and even downed trees can often be pushed aside with the front end loader.

Eventually, Dad bought his own tractor, a Kubota. It’s only 15 HP or so, but with 4 wheel drive, a 3-point hitch pulling a bush hog, and a front end loader, its amazing how much work can be done on a gallon of diesel oil. One pass down a trail makes it grandmother-friendly, whacking down all the weeds, chopping up loose sticks, and even flattening some of the humps in the ground. There are a lot of places here you just wouldn’t go if Dad or I hadn’t bush hogged it first. I especially enjoy mowing down multiflora rose, an especially annoying introduced species.

Kubotas are pretty handy, but they can’t do everything. Tractors tend to be tippy, so they don’t work laterally on hills. Ours has the front wheels mounted as far out as possible, and the back wheels were mounted in reverse, increasing the wheel base, but it still has a relatively high center of gravity, and you need to be careful to avoid an accident. Big stumps are a problem, and need to be avoided.

Big trees are down on trails in several places, and only a bulldozer would be able to flatten out those root balls and fill in the holes. Or time. If you wait long enough, whatever falls on the trail will decay to the point where the Kubota can break it up, push it out of the way, chop it up, or drive over it. I was able to get to the upper meadow last year for the first time since the ice storm 3-4 years ago, crunching through a tree that was downed over the trail. The trail makes a switchback and begins a steep ascent up to the end of the trail, which was the worst possible spot for a large tree to fall, filling the trail with a trunk too big to drive over, a large ball of dirt and root, and a Kubota-eating hole. Last year, I was very carefully able to detour by taking an even steeper route straight up, but this week, it was too wet, and I couldn’t get enough traction.

Today: singing milkweed beetles, scarlet tananger, ruby throated hummingbird

Dad and I drove down to the Hollow today to make sure that everything would be ready for next week’s stay. We arrived to find two pickups from the power company parked in the drive ahead of us–we don’t get a lot of visitors, although we’re never sure what happens when we aren’t there.

They were there to spray the plants underneath our power lines, and their trucks were full of all kinds of maintenance equipment. Its always useful to have a friend with a chain saw. It turned out that there had been a big storm a couple of days ago, and a maple tree had come down on the drive. They offered to clear it out for us, and 5 minutes later, the road was open again.

We were planning on weedeating and bushhogging, but the drive was rutted from the heavy rains this week, so we decided to pull the bushog off the back of the Kubota and mount the blade. To make a long story short, it turned out that the tractor wasn’t broken, it only had a loose battery cable. This was successfully diagnosed remotely by the farmer across the valley, who still came over to supervise our wrenchwork.

There’s a reason that road graders have such long chassis with the blade mounted in the center, instead of at the end of a long lever hanging off the back. When you use a blade on a tractor, every little bump in the road surface causes a wild fluctuation in the height of the blade. It goes better with one person standing on blade, sometimes leaning towards the high side, yelling height instructions to the tractor driver. Inside of 15 minutes, we’d made a pretty good work out of the road, neatly filling in the ruts.

We put the bushhog back on tractor, and Dad mowed the meadow while I went over the drive with a rake. Dad bought a new Stihl weedeater, and I gotta tell ya, a new Stihl chops up a lot more weeds, a lot faster, than its 25 year old predecessor. I did the face of the dam, and some of the surrounding areas.

The pond was more full than I’ve ever seen it. A couple years ago, when the standpipe rusted out, we enlarged the pond by setting the outlet of the new pipe a couple feet higher. Also, we had 30 years worth of silt pulled out of the back of the pond, and also had it dug out a bit wider and longer in the back. After the big storm, the crick was still running into the back of the pond. The water is usually a couple feet below the outlet by July, so its pretty unusual to see it full up at this time of year.

The guys from the power company said that someone had sighted a funnel cloud nearby during the recent storm. There musta been some funky winds, because there were an unusual number of trees down–mostly at the top half. Besides the one on the drive, there were three down on the drive to the meadow. Two big branches came down with a thump, a few hundred yards from me while I was working. I haven’t seen this many trees and branches down since the big ice storm a few years ago.

Sighting: great blue heron