More Man Work!

Tuesday, May 26th. Seppi saw me heading out to the wilderness with a shovel, a machete, and some clippers. He immediately ran to the tool shed to grab his hatchet and followed along.

Yes, a five-year-old (almost six) has a hatchet. It is quite blunt, you couldn’t cut a dandelion with it, but it is the right weight and size for him to get the hang of swinging it. We have to teach him on something. As it was, however, there was no hatchet work here. This is all hemlock, blackberry and ivy.

That’s okay, he likes using the clippers almost as much.

But nothing like posing with the hatchet. It was about 10:00 AM when we got finished with the lane between the chicken yard and the property fence, having done most of it the afternoon prior. This is really more a matter of digging and pulling than it is cutting and chopping. The few hemlocks have to be gotten out before they go to seed, but if you only cut them off they simply re-sprout from the roots, closer to the ground so they are harder to see, blossom faster, and send out more seeds. The best way is to loosen the roots with a shovel, and then pull the whole thing out.

This, however, was the easy bit. There remained the jungle on the other side of the fence. Our neighbor is too old to manage it himself so once a summer we go over and cut it back, just to keep it from growing and seeding through our fence ( because that’s how all the hemlock got into the garden last year!)

On the way through the pasture we ran into some thistles, and decided to get rid of them while we were there.

You might be wondering why dig them rather than just cut them off. The answer is that the more of the root you get out, the less energy it has to send up a new thistle. Since we had just had a day of heavy rain, the soil was already loose, so why not pull them? At first, I was using a shovel to loosen the dirt around the roots, and then pull the roots out. However, after a few times I started to notice something odd.

The roots were coming out easily, even without being loosened. More interesting, there were no root hairs to be seen for the first 6-8 inches. No root hairs on any of them.

This suggested to me a mechanism by which the intensive rotational grazing reduces thistle pressure over time. As the grass density increases, the grass roots take over the top 6-8 inches of soil, and this forces out the root hairs on the thistle tap roots. This means that it can’t grip in the top 6-8 inches of soil. When I pull it up, it snaps off deep in the ground. It will then have to send the new shoot up through 6-8 inches of soil before it can put on leaves and start photosynthesizing. It only took about 30 minutes to get the whole patch of 50-60 thistles out of the ground.

Then we got on the other side of the fence and started in on the blackberries and hemlock (and ivy).

Seppi asked if he could use the machete, and I figured, why not? We took a few minutes to talk about safe machete use: Firm stance, solid footing, two hands on the handle (can’t chop your own hand if both of them are on the handle), chop sideways or diagonally but never downward (feet are downward), good follow through.

Turns out he is a natural.

We developed a good rhythm, I was pulling the hemlock and as much of the blackberry as I could, and tossing it to the side. Seppi came behind and chopped the branches and piles of weeds behind me, making the path wider.

As we moved further along, into the wooded section of the wilderness, we slowed down considerably.

This area is more ivy than blackberry, and no hemlock. Ivy is very difficult to attack with a machete, because it runs along the ground, and then wraps in and around the wires of the fence and the posts. This took a lot of work digging and ripping, so Seppi got a little bored here. He was very determined, though, to be the first to touch the trunk of this tree.

Once through the tree, I took over the machete work because we were getting past lunch time.

Seppi followed behind with the clippers to cut the Ivy away from the fence posts. We need to cut the vines at the bottoms so that the vines hanging at the top of the post die.

3 hours later…

A clear path the whole length of the fence, all the way to the shop.

Seppi. What a man! not-quite-six and he can hang for three hours of brush clearing. I didn’t ask him to, or make him do it at all. I just encouraged and thanked him, and he did all the rest by himself.

When we were done he asked for pepperoni pizza, because: “I got a cut from a thorn, and some blood came out. But pepperoni has blood in it. That’s why it’s red. So I can eat the pepperoni and it will put the blood back in me.”

Of course we went to the grocery store and got some pepperoni and made a pepperoni pizza for Seppi.

So proud of that little man!