Clearing the Land

A neighbor had once said that mowing would probably be the best way to keep the ticks down, as well as other insects. And I've noticed a lot of woody plants coming up in the field, so I think it's important to clear it, at least once a year. I've also got to come up with some low-budget activities since we're here another week, and out of money.

We don't have a mower, or tractor, or anything like that. But we do have a weedwhacker. I tried a cordless trimmer and it had absolutely no power - the battery was dead in 30 minutes. So we got the most powerful corded trimmer available, about $70. This works phenomenally well, though of course you've got to drag the cord around. We've got 300 feet of 12 gauge extension cord. Cordless just never has the power of AC, unless you spend four times as much.

I start with clearing our high-use areas, around the garden first. Here's a few photos of it finished:

You can see the persimmon has put out several big leaves, and the perennial thyme is doing very well. These plants started out in a little tray of six.

Here's the fireplace and pool area:

Rachael gave it a shot for a while:

I then started clearing the hillside, working behind the barn and to the west of it. Here's a pic:


It was interesting to have so much lawn. I missed the lush fields of clover, though of course they'd be back in seconds. There was suddenly so much space we could actually walk across and use.

I continued to work west, clearing towards the gazebo:

I came across several mantids, working the high grass, and brought them down to the garden. Here's one on Brooke's wrist:

Here's the area around the gazebo cleared, a big job:

Clearing all this land with a trimmer was slow and arduous, and of course absurd. But I felt it needed done so that we'd have a good field next year.

Here's the field cleared down the hillside south of the gazebo:

I stopped about right there.

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I got stung by wasps on the section leading up to the gazebo. I got simulataneously stung on the arm and on my cheek. My cheek killed for a day. And then when I walked down to the fireplace I got stung right in the chest. This was very strange. We'd lived in peace with the wasps in the fireplace all this time, and now all the sudden one went up and stung me. He must have sensed something, or there's some kind of wasp communication, and I was now a threat.

Rachael also got stung a few times. It really hurts. We drop the trimmer and run screaming. I've been stung by hornets before, but this is worse. They're some kind of ground-dwelling wasps. The only sting it's not more painful than would be a bumblebee. You think of bumblebees as being so docile, and harmless, and in general they are. But I had one sting me in the knee once, and it's like a gunshot. For 24 hours the pain was unbelievable.

There's a funny story in connection with this. The girls and I were camping up at Graveyard Fields, about an hour west of Asheville, N.C. off the Blue Ridge Parkway, on the edge of the Shining Rock Wilderness. We'd found a secret camp in a grove of maple. The trail was so close I could see it well from camp, but nobody on the trail could see us because of the trees.

I saw an Indian guy go by, with a bucket, and his dog. I started thinking about how close even modern day Indians are to the land. He's probably up here every year to get a ton of berries. I envied him, and admired him. They seem at home outside, at peace, and seem to listen to what's around them.

Later that day as the girls and I were walking the trail back up to camp, coming from swimming below the waterfalls in the creek, we encountered this Indian again. This time he was with another person, joking and laughing, and before he could even greet us he started swearing and yelling and wrestling to get his shirt off. I saw a bumblebee drop out, and he cursed it and stomped on it. I didn't despise him, because I knew how painful it was from getting stung myself, and hugging my knee all day. But it did temper my admiration, and make me rethink what I imagined was his unattainable connection to the land.

As I finished the clearing, some interesting things occured. For one the puffballs came back. We saw them everywhere.

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Here's a photo:

And you know that line from FIELD OF DREAMS, "if you build it, they will come"? Well in this instance, it was, "if you clear it, they will come."

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We first saw a groundhog out eating the young grass sprouting back up. Rachael stalked him and got very close (about 8 feet away), and took several photos, but in every one he's in the shade of the tree and hard to spot. Here's the picture where he's most visible:

You can see him there with his head up if you really study it.

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And then a yearling fawn showed up. He came and grazed every evening, sometimes in the early evening, very close to us. His presence became commonplace. We saw him nearly every day, morning and evening. Sometimes he'd spook if we got too close, and bound off into the woods. But he'd come back, shortly after. Here's a couple of photos of him:

One time two full grown doe came down early in the morning to graze.

I think if we had Mishka here we probably wouldn't have had so many forest visitors. He would have chased them out.