Epic Beautification 3: Hobbit House

 One brushpile, I don't burn. Two reasons: It's out at the end of the orchard, and burning it would certainly start a forest fire. Second, it is made up of dead wood and fallen limbs, with no brushy invasives or vines laden with seeds. Those all get hauled to the burn piles.

The orchard is very long, as long as the oil road, and I need someplace to put the limbs and logs that fall across the lanes and keep the brushhog from doing its job of keeping the rose and honeysuckle cut down. So here it is, and here it has been for many years. Lately it has begun to look intentional, beautiful, even. I didn't mean to do that. It just happened, when the logs I cut this fall were too big and heavy for me to hoist, when the pile got so tall I could no longer throw things like that up onto it. Just a couple of good windstorms will bring down enough limbs and logs to do that.

While the guys were mowing and cutting dead trees, I was unearthing and cutting up logs that my Amish crew cut and pushed aside in 2019. The logs were keeping the Massey from getting into some rose thickets. 

I'm hoping this becomes a home for bobcats or turkey vultures (who will nest on the ground under good shelter), foxes and skunks, groundhogs, rabbits, coyotes...maybe it already is. They might be using a back entrance. 

Maybe hobbits or gnomes are living there. Something. I should put a trailcam on it!

Over time, it will melt down until I can again throw logs on top. That's how such things go.

There was a lot more to go on the giant meadow brushpile. Three of the Russian prunes that had held a thorny throne along my driveway for probably 50 years died in the ongoing drought. If there's anything worse than a Russian prune alive, it's a dead one. Their wood is hard, dense, unyielding. Their twigs are heavily thorned, stiff, springy. You cannot load a cart with Russian prune. It's like loading a cart with box springs. You have to drag it to its destination. And so I asked Walter and Timmy to cut the dead prunes down so they could use the Massey 135 to drag them down to the meadow brushpile.

Kevin, the tractor magician, secures a chain around the massive trunk of a 44-year-old Russian prune, then drags it to the brushpile, saving me literally days of work trying to top and process the stupid things. I know it was 44 years old because I counted the rings.

 Magic! 

Just like that, it's GONE! 

Timmy went down to the pile and cut it into pieces he could hoist atop the mess. That was a heroic deed.

The shadows were getting long by the time he got that done.

OK. 

Back to the brushpile du jour. Here it is after the meadow was mown on Nov. 9, the cut logs of the prune trees showing. (No, they never made prunes. They even stopped blooming as they got senescent in the last few years.)

It is almost the size, if not the height, of my house.  It's going to be one hell of a fire. We're going to wait for exactly the right conditions, which will be calm conditions or a light wind from the south, to move the flames from the end near the woods up the hill toward the open meadow. It will need to have rained a lot within the last few days, and the ground should be damp. And we will have probably four people with shovels in a ring around the pile, waiting to catch any sparks. 

While Kevin was mowing, some goldenrod seed-fluff built up on the hot manifold of the tractor and caught fire. He shut the tractor down and brushed the burning fluff to the ground. Where, of course, it took off. He stomped it all out and we had a good, if nervous, laugh about it. This is how wildfires happen! I am so grateful for this careful crew of men. I wouldn't think of trying to burn without them here.

We'll take no chances with this forest and my home. If we have to wait until February to burn, so be it.

My Apple Watch told the story of the Big Mow of November 9. I would sleep for ten hours that night.

Sunset on a clean field; great horned owl hooting out at the end. Ahhhh.

And the next morning Curtis and I would start our walk on a newly clean road.

Destination: Hobbit House. 

Epic Beautification 2: Friends to the Rescue

On  November 4, after days of work, my little Deere X300 crapped out on me. It kept surging and cutting off, something it's done before. The two times it happened before, there was a stinkbug in the gas tank. This didn't feel quite like that. It was too predictable. It would happen on startup, when the engine was cold, and then it would calm down.  The surging would start again when the engine was hot and I was going uphill with a load. 

One thing for sure: I was very bummed to have my best mate back in the shop. I'd only gotten it back in June from another gas tank cleanout, at tremendous expense, including a $200 pickup and delivery fee!

David and Laura, my incredible naturalist/photographer/videographer friends and neighbors, to the rescue! They brought their big pickup and trailer. First we threw my last five loads from the oil road onto their trailer and hauled it to the brushpile.

We threw the brush on the pile. In about a half hour, David and Laura did another full day's work for me. It sure helps to have the right gear, in this case a trailer that would take all the brush at once.

Then, we loaded the tractor onto the trailer.

I can't even tell you how wonderful it was to have such great help, and to not have to throw another $200 down the well for transport. I followed the truck into town to arrange the repair.

I asked the repair shop to change the oil while it was in and they assured me they would. 

I got it back in a couple days; they said the diaphragm in the fuel pump was bad, so they replaced the whole pump. Sounded reasonable, cost $145...I've never been so happy to pay that kind of money. Could it really have been that simple? No. It was even simpler.

 Dave and Laura went back and picked it up for me, and when I started it, it surged and killed exactly as it had when I sent it in. Now I was MAD. Had the shop tested their work? Apparently not. And they hadn't fixed the problem. @#$@#$#$%#$!!!!

Since it was a predictable problem, I was able to sneak in a couple more loads from around the oilwell before the tractor acted up and died on me again.

Well, at least I was done with the oil road, and I managed to clear the mess behind the oilwell that had obstructed my favorite Loop trailhead. Mow Day, Nov. 9, was almost upon me. I'd deal with the sick tractor later.

Curtis and I were plumb worn out.  But there was one more huge day to go. 

Here's a look at the meadow and brushpile the night before the big mow on November 9, 2024.

It's just stunning the growth that takes place over one season. The place is totally transformed by tall heads of goldenrod and shining sumac poking up through it. I like to leave all that until it loses the last bit of life and color. Then I'm ready to see it go, whether we've had frost or not (not yet, as of Nov. 12.) 

I charged the big Massey 135's battery for several hours the night before Walter, Timmy and Kevin arrived. It didn't take them too long to get it roaring and going on the big job. Kevin loves to run my red tractor, he says it's a nice little machine. And he goes allll day long on that thing.  He's incredibly good at nosing it and backing it into nooks of invasive vegetation and mowing it all down. He's got a sixth sense for where I'd like him to mow, and walking through the orchard and along the meadow borders is always such a delight after Kevin's been through.

While Kevin was mowing, I asked Walter and Timmy to give a listen to my John Deere.  I started it up and yes, the constant surging and eventual sputtering out was happening still. 

They checked hoses and wires and fiddled with choke and throttle and finally Walter said, "You know, these John Deere's have a sensor that'll shut 'em down when they get too low on oil. Let's check the oil." 

"Good idea, " I replied, having had NO idea such a sensor existed. "But I asked the shop to change the oil so it should be full." 

 

Well. The shop hadn't changed the oil, and it was very low. Holy cow. Could it have been as simple as that? All this time, just low on oil? No bug in the tank, no busted fuel pump, just low on oil?

Walter put about half a quart in and started it back up. It surged a bit, and we ran it for awhile, then shut it down. The next time I started it, it ran like a top. I think...we...figured..it out. Time will tell. 

What would I do without my friends?
I sure couldn't make it alone out here.

Here's how the meadow looked after Kevin got done with it. Willya look at that brushpile though?

Here, I have to divert a bit and perhaps explain myself to some who may not grasp what I'm dealing with on these 80 acres. Every time I post a photo of one of my brushpiles (and they have been legion since I got serious about cleaning this place up in 2019), I get comments from people who ask why I don't just "leave the brushpiles to rot." Why do I burn the brushpiles? Why don't I want to sequester carbon and give habitat to the wildlife? 

Why would I want to burn a brushpile? 

Because this is not the only brushpile I've made. Since 2019, I've probably made ten or more of these enormous piles of invasive vegetation. Here's a little review of piles I made just in 2021.

Dec. 27, 2021

Jan. 10, 2021 As you can see, they grow to titanic proportions when I get a bee in my shorts.

April 2, 2021. Mostly multiflora rose, the worst worst worst! That stuff will seed and re-root in a brushpile. It needs to go away forever. Leave that "to rot" and it will spring up 100 hydra heads.

April 3, 2021. Autumn olive, just leafing out, cut from the driveway. It's easy to spot and cut when it's leafing out, before any native plants awaken. Well, it's not easy to cut. It's thorny and horrible. Not something I want to look at for years, thank you.

I'm cutting invasives all through the fall, winter and early spring, just trying to reclaim this place from the disgusting tangle of vegetative trash (Japanese honeysuckle, autumn olive, Amur honeysuckle, and multiflora rose) that it had become by the time Bill died in 2019. 

So, tell me. How would my sanctuary look if I "just left the brushpile to rot" times a dozen? How would the meadow look, dotted with piles of brush that then become multiflora rose, Japanese honeysuckle and Asian bunchgrass nurseries? What is in those piles you do not want to re-seed, re-sprout, re-spread!

Y'all are free to leave your personal brushpiles to rot. I'm going to doubt they are far taller than your head, and I also doubt that you make several such mountainous piles every season. I am not sure that those who question what I'm up to here fully grasp the volume of brush we're talking about. This 80 acres is an invasive vegetation factory, and it runs day and night. The gears are always turning, the conveyer belts always bringing more loads of the plants I don't want.  In the last two days I've found two new invasives on the place: Callery pear, lollipop tree beloved by developers, now scourge of the highway shoulders (AAACK) and privet. They die! 

 I am always fighting for space and light for the useful and beautiful natives that belong here: dogwood, spicebush, tulip trees, nannyberry, sassafras, persimmon, pawpaw, oaks, hickories, black, red and sugar maples, to name just a few of the trees I cut around. These are the trees I free from being smothered. These are the neighbors I want. And this is why I burn. 

Third and final installment coming soon! 

Epic Beautification 1

                                   

Being a chronicle of the efforts of one medium-sized woman to create an exclusive, native plants only sanctuary in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. There is some hiring out, but not much.  

                        

The crisp fall days send me outdoors to work. I can't stay inside, and, squirrel-like, I feel like I have to accomplish something BIG before winter sets in. So in the third week of October, I set myself a goal to clear the road to my oil well before the Big Mow on Saturday, November 9, 2024. You see, this summer (2024) the oil and gas company that holds a lease on my oil well ( a common feature of every 40 acre parcel in my area of southeast Ohio) decided, after probably 15 years of neglect, to bulldoze and widen the service road that goes to the well. Which was a total surprise to me. I was delighted, having decided they would never again do any real maintenance on it, and it was all up to me to keep it open. The only hitch was that the dozer simply pushed all the brush over to the sides and it looked like hell. Worse, it would be a nursery for multiflora rose, which would come up like gangbusters under the protection of all the brush and fallen logs. And then I'd have as bad a mess as I started with. 

 The idea was, I'd get all the brush cleared from the bulldozing of this road, which runs along the east edge of my big meadow. I'd load it in my little wagon, pull it with the Deere tractor, and pile it on an already enormous brushpile in the meadow, just in case we might be able to burn it on Mow Day.

I knew, with the Extreme drought now going into its sixth consecutive month (we've had less than 5" of rain in six months!!) that the likelihood of being able to burn it was nil. But I still wanted to try to get the brush cut and gathered and hauled. I got serious about it on October 27, my first full day of clearing. It began to sink in on me how big the job was when I looked and I had cleared maybe 200' of road after working all day. First, I have to chainsaw the brush and logs down to manageable pieces. Then I load them in the wagon and pull it with my little John Deere X300 to the brushpile. I figured out that five loads is the maximum I can expect to get cut, loaded and thrown on the pile in a day of work. After five, I'm too tired to do more.

They're big loads, as this trailcam photo shows. Each one takes 1-2 hours to create and deal with.

Here's the energy expenditure of a typical day of cutting and hauling. It was pretty funny to have my Pilates and yoga app bugging me all week long to get some exercise with this going on in the background! Needless to say, yoga could wait. I did notice that, with a few months of Pilates and yoga exercise under my belt, I simply did not get sore from all this exertion. A good soak in Epsom every  night and I was good to go the next morning. It felt great to become a machine, well oiled and working! 

My best guy is always at my side, watching me carefully, for what I'm not sure--signs of distress? A fall? I don't think he'd run to the house and dial the sheriff like Lassie would (Arf! Arf! Arf!  What's that you say, Lassie? Timmy fell down the well?) but his presence is very comforting. He's helping in intangible ways, cheering me on.

I make sure to bring snacks and plenty of water for us both.

This video will give you an idea of the scale of the job as I peruse one small section of the woods road.

The only way to get it done is to do it in small bits. The bits were smaller than I'd have liked, but the mess was so much greater than I'd realized at first. In the end, I cut, piled and hauled  35 loads with my Stihl chainsaw and little Deere tractor. 

It seemed like I would never stop finding piles of brush and dead trees to deal with.

I also found a less common invasive: Euonymus alata, or burning bush. It was pretty, but I cut it down, because it doesn't belong here and is invasive.

Load after load after load, cut and hauled.

I cut five portals to the meadow along the road's length, which bring me joy, and I'm sure they delight the wildlife, too. Even if I don't decide to pop through them, having that peek of a view and the possibility of easily crossing into the  meadow lifts my heart. 

In between all the work, a delightful diversion: a grayish jumping spider, Phidippus princeps, scoots around on my tractor dash. I about died from the cute.

The saga continues in my next post.