Uh Oh! And More Saplings

 Felt a hair move on my wrist.  Black spot.  Then it jumped away.  Danm, a flea!  Not after me, but it means it is time to change the 8-month flea collars again.  I thought they were good for another month, but I suppose their effectiveness diminishes toward the end.  

Brought a trailerload of cut saplings to the Mulch Center, but there are many more to go.  I cut down a dozen but haven't dragged them to the trailer yet.  My neighbors are probably tired of seeing the trailer full of them.  So I'll leave them in the back yard until I have a full load.

Need to get the brush-mower fixed.  I left gas in it 2 years ago and I can't start it.  Thought I had drained the gas then but I didn't.  I tried to clean the gas lines, but gas engines aren't my best skill.  On a scale of 10; maybe a 2.

My eyeglasses went weird lately.  One lens keeps dropping out.  I keep screwing the tiny screw tight, but it won't stay tight.  I need to dab it with a toothpick drop of cement.  But to see it well enough enough I need the funny on-head magnifier and I can't seem to find it right now.   

And the frame suddenly didn't sit on my ears properly.  I had do to twist the nose rests, bend the ear holders, even twist the frame a bit.  Why it changed, I haven't a clue.  It's not like I sat on them or something.

Well, I need new ones anyway.  A weird thing (to me) is that my vision is actually getting more normal.  I've lived most of my life far-sighted.  Could see a hummingbird 150' away but couldn't focus on a book without reading glasses.  

Now I actually need less close up help.  I can still see the hummers but can't see the colors well enough to tell males from females.  A few more years and I will probably see the car dashboard better!  

Maybe I'll die with 20/20 vision, LOL!

Catching Up

Wow, 2 weeks since I posted here!  Well, I've been busy. 

1.  My lettuce trays on the deck "bolted" in the August heat.  Time to replant.  I have a large shallow plastic tub I use for mixing potting soil for Spring plantings.  Fine for dumping the soil in the trays and mixing it around to add new slow-release fertilizer, too.  

I did that on the deck.  No rain forecast for 2 days, so time to let it dry a bit for easier mixing.  Naturally, it rained.  And then more forecast for the next day, so I covered it wit a piece of plywood that almost reached the edges so I added a a big trask bag to reached over the sides.

The rain got in there anyway!  So I tilted it and siphoned the water out.  Muddy water doesn't siphon well, so I had to keep fussing with the tube.  I got most of it out.  And realized I had a dry tray inside, so I added that to soak up the rest.

That's not exactly rocket science, but it does take time.  I covered it better today.  The remnants of Hurricane Ida are coming straight through here Wed and maybe dropping 2-3 inches of rain on us.  The last thing I need for the trays is mud.  It compacts as it dries and I want to replant soon.  I miss my bright red leaf lettuce in my salads!

2.  I bought a battery-powered mower in 2018.  It's pathetic.  I went by Amazon ratings (no offence to Amazon) but I sometimes forget that their ratings only apply to customer ratings about things Amazon sells.  So if they sell average stuff, the best ratings are still about average stuff.

The Greenworks mower I bought has batteries difficult to remove (I devised twine loops to pull them out),  the batteries die after 10 minutes, the power is so weak that the mower cringes at 4" grass being cut down to 3", and it is entirely push/pull.  I've hated it for 3 years!

So I went to Consumer Reports magazine website (I have a subscription) and went looking for the best self-propelled models.  Wow, what a difference!  The one I bought in 2018 was rated poor.  

The best Top 3 ones at CR were about the same.  I bought a Ryobi "40V HP Brushless 21 in. Cordless Battery Walk Behind Self-Propelled Lawn Mower with (2) 6.0 Ah Batteries and Charger", model RY401014US (if you are curious).

I used it yesterday and it worked great.  Powerful, long-lasting. cut down 16" high weeds in an old bed for renovation (with a bit of care).  I had let a tall-growing weed grow there to smother the others.  I love the self-propelled rear drive wheels.  I WAS disappointed to realize that it didn't self-propel in reverse, but apparently none of them do.  My DR brush-mower does and I made an assumption that forward also allowed back.

But I use it in tight spaces and around trees where the riding mower can't go.  It's the forward self-propel that helps the most.

3.  And speaking of the DR brush mower (brutal thing that can cut down weedy shrubs and wild saplings 1.5" thick, turns blackberry canes into mulch, and is self-propelled forwards and back), I left it with gas in the tank 2 years ago (well, I expected to use it again soon but didn't).  Won't start now.  Have to inject the fuel line with "starter fluid".  Sounds like an old boy scout joke about smoke shifters, sky hooks, and 50' of shoreline, but it is real.  

If that doesn't work, back to the repair shop and and they both slow and expensive.  One thing I hate repairing is gasoline engines.  I can fix a lot of things, but those aren't one that comes easily.  

A neighbor once climbed up on the fence and asked if I was good at repairing things.  I said "yeah, as long as it isn't a 2-stroke gasoline engine".  You should have seen the look on his face; that was exactly what he needed help with, LOL!

I am switching to almost all-battery stuff these days.  They just keep working,

4.  Time for my first car maintenance visit.  13 months and I've driven 600 miles!  Laugh if you want to; I just don't drive much.  But I'm going to have to drive 120 mile round trip sometime in September to adopt my female Tonkinese cat, so I need to make sure the car is ready for a trip.

5.  The garden is producing a meal's worth of flat italian Romano beans every other day.  Not bad for a 5' long 1' wide trellis".  My 3 cherry tomatoes have fruits and I expect to strt picking ripe one in 2 weeks.  The regular-size tomatoes were planted late and are just beginning to open blossoms.  It will be a contest between warm-weather growing and the first frost on late October.  I expect a month's worth at least.  Maybe 6 weeks.

6.  The deck Mums are starting to bloom.  Yellow, orange, and red.  That will be nice.

7.  The Black-Eyed Susans are blooming nicely.

Actually, they are very numerous and spreading.  Well, they are native here. so no threat.  I encourage them.  They bloom for a few months.  My plan is to transplant the Susans in the garden paths to the meadow bed and add purple coneflower transplants (from places I don't want them).  Yellow and purple together look good to me.

Undergrowth

Three years ago, after failing to find anyone who would clear 1/8 acre of wild blackberries and small junk saplings, I bought a brush mower.  It is like a super-heavy-duty lawnmower.  The blade is bigger and heavier.  It has forward and reverse powered wheels.  It cuts down sapling 1 1/2" thick.  It grinds up debris like a chipper-shredder.

It worked great!  Cleared that whole area in 2 hours.  But all gas-powered machines need some basic maintenance and I am terrible about leaving old gas in the tanks.  It goes bad in the tank and leaves some parts sticky with dried gas.

That Spring, there wasn't much new undergrowth, so I thought I had killed it.  There was some growth  that Fall, but I planted 4 decorative trees (2 Sourwoods and 2 Korean Dogwoods) expecting that the shade of the trees would keep the undergrowth down (I used to have junk trees there that did that) and I would just brush-cut again THIS Spring.

Couldn't get it to start.   I gave a half-hearted try of soaking up the old gas with an old towel and then spraying carburetor cleaner into the tank and carburetor and adding a small amount of new gas.  No luck.

I probably could to a complete carburetor removal and cleaning.  I've done it before.  It a pain.  And I have a regular lawn mower than needs the same work.  I decided to just let a professional do them both.  Which requires delivering them to a repair shop.  Remember a couple days ago I mentioned my trailer was full of yard debris and I was waiting for the recycling center to dry and it won't because of all the rain?  I kept waiting.  And waiting.

I guess I am just going to have put on my mud boots and get rid of the yard debris.  Then bring the brush mower and regular mower to the repair place and wait for a month for them to fix them.  I can clear the brush in Winter as well as I can today.  And maybe that makes the blackberries die being cut down out of season (one can always hope).

One thing I am ceetain of is that, after years of this, I will either drain the gas from all my equipment or add gas stabilizer to the tanks!  

My "TO DO" list has gotten too long for me to mess with gas engines.  I'm losing ground on it the list.  It is probably the thing I CAN do that I like the least.  There is too much to do inside the house easier to do the than the things I like least.  And that would cost the same for professional help.

I also am making a list of professional improvements I want for the house (I'm not even going to TRY to install linoleum floors or wall tile).  But that's a future post. 

The Bramble And Sapling Jungle, Part 1

IIRC, it was Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty' that had a briar jungle raised around her sleeping place by the evil Queen Maleficent.  Her briar jungle had nothing on mine (in my eyes).

 After I removed some junk trees that had finally grown tall enough to shade my vegetable garden 6 years ago, the increased sunlight below them allowed shade-supressed wild blackberry, wild non-fruiting grape vines, green-briars, and English Ivy grew rampant.  Junk tree seeds found a good spot to grow.

When I moved here 32 years ago, it was like that.  It took me 5 years to clear the area.  I dug out a 10' circle 2' deep and installed a pond liner.  I dug a 40' long raceway downslope to the pond and installed a liner and a submersible pump to push water to the top for waterflow over rocks I placed in the raceway.  The sounds of the splashing water were always soothing.  I bought a bench to sit on to enjoy the pond and raceway.  I built a nice little bridge across the raceway for convenience and planted hostas along both sides and planted astilbes all around the pond.

Somewhere over the years, I kind of ignored it for a while.  Fall leaves filled it and were hard to net out among the lily plants and sweet flag.  A fallen branch poked a hole in the liner about 6" from the bottom and the pond drained.  I tried to patch the hole, but could never get it properly sealed.  Then one hot Summer day, I realized there were tens of thousands of mosquito larvae growing in that 6" of water.  I poked more holes in it deliberately to drain it completely, intending to replace the liner and get the waterflow working again.

That didn't happen.  The pond liner replacement was always on my "to do" list but other things came first.

Two years ago, I decided to try to reclaim that portion of the back yard.  Loppers on 8' high 1" thich wild blackberries does not work.  They ALWAYS fell on me and getting those things loose is awkward and sometimes painful.

I decided to hire someone to clear the area.  Individuals said it was too much work; companies said it was too little work  One guy agreed to do the work.  He didn't show up.  When I called him, he was in a hospital with a broken leg and that he was retiring from yardwork.  I expressed my sympathies to him about the leg, but it left me no choice.

I was going to have to do it myself!

I bought a DR Brush/Sapling mower.  After delays (the shipper lost it) then (after they found it 3 weeks later) discussions about how it could be delivered (they wanted a commercial dock to deliver it to and I had to arrange a 3rd party delivery), I finally received it.

The Brush/Sapling mower works great.  But that is for tomorrow...

DR Brush Mower

I had brambles and wild blackberries and wild grape vines taking over 1/2 the backyard.  I tried lopping them down, I tried a hedge trimmer, I yanked and pulled.  Nothing was getting me anywhere.  The stuff grew as fast as I could cut.    And most of what I cut had thorns which managed to grab at me.  Some days, I looked like I had been attacked to a pack of rabid weasels.

So I bought a DR Brush Mower.  It wasn't an easy decision.  Those things aren't cheap.  And they come with serious warnings about possibly injury.  So I watched videos of people using them (happily and unhappily).  I read about them.

I admit that when I saw people just chopping and mulching shrubs and 1.5" saplings with the self-propelled kinds, I gave in. 

The delivery was all messed up (it got lost in Baltimore for 2 weeks), but it did arrive.  I uncrated it with some difficulty but got it freed.  I read the instruction manual 3x. 

It is a funny thing.  There are large heavily-treaded wheels on the back and pipes like thick sled runners in the front.  The engine could power a motorcycle.  The blade is a sharpened rod of metal 1/2" thick.  My riding mower blade is turned by rubber belts; this thing is all metal gears.  There are 3 forward speeds and 1 reverse by levers at the handle.

I got it started up in the garage and drove it around back.  I gave it a brief try into the edges of the brambles and it reduced them to mulch.  It doesn't cut and ground level like a lawn mower; it just pushes stuff over flat and grinds it up.

There are some limits.  It doesn't handle raised areas or stumps of saplings larger than 1.5 inches.  But OMG, does it chop up anything it can propel itself onto and over!  My first run-though was exciting; I left a path of mulch as I went.  The reverse gear is really valuable.  The brushmower gets into places where there are brambles left above, but just reversing pulls it back out.  Its not easy to turn around in tight places, but powered backing out helps.

It can't do much about grapevines and greenbriars hanging up in trees.  I've learned to use a hedge trimmer to cut through the wild grape vines and my electric chain saw to cut saplings over 1.5" at ground level first.  But using the brushmower to clear paths through the brambles gave me access to them.

Spent the first 2 days with the brushmower, cutting paths through the bramble and shrubs and small saplings.  Yesterday and today, I used the cordless hedgetrimmer to cut vines and small briars to get me access to the larger saplings.  I used the electric chainsaw to cut larger saplings. 

I was worn out, and rather minorly injured all over.  Even cutting as many vines as I could with the hedgetrimmer, there were still some out of reach creating odd tensions on the tree.  So everytime I used the chainsaw, expecting the 3" diameter tree to fall in a certain direction, it fell on me!

And malevolently!  The tree would fall, pushing of my hat, and then looping briars around my head.  This is AWFUL work!  But it is my fault I allowed things to get to such a state and I want to personally clear every last inch my self.  Matter of pride and obsession...

Here are "before" pictures...

And here are the first "after" pictures (before today's work which I haven't taken pictures of yet)...

More "after" pics soon.  But I can see some ground again.  I can see the back fence again. 

Almost Delivered

The DR brand self-propelled brush mower arrived at the nearest delivery depot they use today.  Its a Fedex depot.  I chose that because DR ships stuff freight and the options were (since a freight truck can't back up into my driveway and get out in my dead end residential street):  I offload a 250 pound crate from the truck (yeah, right) at no charge or the truckers uses the tailgate to lower the crate to ground level and pushes it off (on the street) for $99.  I considered that, as the mower is probably mostly assembled and it would mean I mostly had to break the crate apart (we are not talking cardboard boxes here).

For no charge, I could have it delivered to a depot and pick it up or arrange redelivery into my garage.  Well, it was a Fedex depot, and they deliver stuff in trucks that can manage residential driveways.  And I could pick it up for free if I drove there and they would load it on my hauling trailer.

So I called Fedex about residential delivery.  I should have called them before I ordered the brush mower.  The depot is out of my delivery area.  They can have it redelivered by a contract company though.

But the Fedex person asked a question I did not expect.  "Do you have permission from the shipper to have a 3rd party pick it up and deliver it to you"?  I had to admit I did not specifically have such permission.  So they are emailing the shipper to receive that permission.

When you get a question you did not expect, it can be hard to think of follow-up questions on the spot.  So I said, yes please email the shipper.

Afterwards, it occurred to me I should have asked why permission was needed.  After all, the shipper had completed the delivery (to the Fedex depot).  Why would they be involved in any further movement of the crate? 

In my working career, I was very good at asking follow-up questions to surprises like that.  These days, not so much.  It might be age, experience with the subject matter at work, less frequency of experiencing surprise questions these days, etc.

But anyway, now I'm waiting for a company to give me permission to have a 3rd party pick up my crate at a depot and deliver it into the garage.  I expect they will grant such permission as a routine matter.

I could drive 40 miles to the Fedex depot and pick it up at any time.  But towing a heavy crate on a 5'x8' trailer is not the safest thing in the world.  And I really hate driving long distances.  40 miles with a trailer is "long" to me.

Everything will get resolved successfully eventually.  I can't WAIT to cut down that 1/8th acre of blackberries, plant some specimen trees and get that part of my back yard back!