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 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.

The Mess Out There

That slight birdy diversion aside (and there will be others), I would like to dwell in this post on the sorry state of my old orchard after the twin blows of a vicious derecho  and the death of my husband, who was the sole chainsaw wielder in the family. 

These photos were taken in January 2020, hence the dreary Mid-Ohio Valley monochrome. I couldn't get through it, couldn't go around it...it was bad. 

Every path looked like this, punctuated by multiple downed trees. Bill counted 32 down right after the storm. Some of them he was able to clear. Most he couldn't.

There were some good sized trees out there, far too big to lever aside. Chainsaw time. And I lack the skills.

It was disheartening, annoying, and there was nothing I could do about it without machinery.
I clipped and cleared as much as I could so I could clamber over the logs, but the fact of them remained, and they weighed heavy on my mind. If you can't get a tractor through to brush hog, you're just going to have to give up getting through at all.

Some of them you couldn't get under, and couldn't go over.

Ugh.

And the walls were closing in. Multiflora rose, honeysuckle and poison ivy was threatening to choke off the paths altogether. You couldn't even get a tractor through in some places.

The absolute worst mess was the former clearing, where we used to build our New Year's sweatlodge and have bonfires. Two huge black oaks came crashing down, putting an end to the clearing.

All this was weighing on my mind as I watched the Amish crews working on the house roofing and siding. They worked like they wanted to work, like they liked to work. So as I was thanking them for their amazing speed and professionality, I asked Daniel Yoder if he knew anyone who might be willing to take a chainsaw (and maybe a Bobcat) to my pathetic mess of an orchard.

"Yeah, we could do that," he replied. My knees nearly buckled. The thought that someone would be willing to tackle this mess for me was so alluring, so fantasmagorical, so undreamt...

I guess you have to realize how long I'd lived without hope of finding anyone, or being able to afford hiring anyone around here, to understand how astonished I was to hear him say he could find the men to tackle it. It was February. The weather was awful. And they wanted to do this for me, soon. Now. I literally would have paid anything, because I'd been trying to get people out to help me for so long, and it just hadn't happened.

Daniel and I walked the orchard, and it didn't take long for us to decide that it needed more than men on foot wielding chainsaws. It needed a Bobcat, or "skid steer," as he called it. The mounds and mountains of multiflora rose had grown up everywhere, and hand-cutting them would be a nightmare compounded. The only thing for it was to push them all the hell off to the sides, uprooting them as they went, then keep the cleared areas mowed so the rose couldn't establish a foothold again. 

And so it was, just a few days later in a light rain,  that I stood on the raised deck and beheld the first assault: a hideously overgrown mess of rose and honeysuckle that had formed mounds around fallen trees just beyond the yard and Liam's willow. Oh, to see that little skid steer push that awful rose away! The crack and crackle of my worst enemy, defeated and pushed back. For once, the roar of a chainsaw and beep of a bulldozer was music to me.

              

We were on our way to recovery, to making the orchard a nice place to be again. It would be a long road, but a good one.