Hand Tools and Techniques for Home Landscaping

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Even with a wrist thong, a machete can ricochet and cut your shin or ankle. Many people who have worked as cane cutters have large scars on their lower legs and a few of them are missing toes from getting too free and easy with their long knife or from trying to use force rather than technique to get the job done.

Bailey's sells a variety of protective devices including woodsman's chaps, which are chain saw resistant. The best safety device, however, is common sense. Stay alert and calm. Sweat in the eyes, buzzing, biting bugs, and heat, or icicles in the beard, frost on the goggles, and cold toes can reduce your attention or raise your ire. Either can cause a slip. So can hunger or thirst. On day-long trips, always carry plenty of water and a big lunch. For a short trek, take along a thermos of cold, sweetened rose-hip tea or bottles of iced, homemade ginger beer and a packet of trail mix containing plenty of instant energy: raisins, dates, or dried pineapple.

Grubbin' in the Dirt

When it's in the garden being sweetened with lime, nourished with compost, stroked, cultivated, fluffed up, de-stoned, and treated like a pampered pet that's almost a member of the family, land is properly called "soil" or, almost reverentially, "the good earth." When it's several cubic yards of hard packed clay and rocks bound together with a snarled network of roots and snags, all overlaid with a tangle of vines, brambles, burrs, thorns, poison ivy, snakes and yellow jacket nests, it's plain "dirt." Pronounced "curt." Or "Gawddamdurt." Or worse.

If you have a lot of "duct" to move and want it done rapidly—say you want to get a pond in within the month—you should consider hiring the work out to a professional or renting a Bobcat or CleatTrak, a small, dozer-blade or back-hoe fitted ridingtype construction machine on wheels or tracks. Not as big or expensive as a full sized earth mover, these little gadgets can nonetheless move a prodigious amount of soil in an afternoon. You can haul them on a trailer behind your truck or have them delivered and picked up. They are easy enough to operate; you can pilot them yourself.

Any established sod—lawn, pasture or meadow—poses a dual barrier to your efforts. It is a thick, interwoven mat that's hard to penetrate and to separate into moveable chunks. And, unless you remove or kill it all, it will grow back stronger than before. See part I of this series on home landscaping (page 44) for details on using chemicals, mulching, using a sod-cutter, and tilling sod under.

Meadow sods are thicker and more robust than lawns and many of the plants they host have tap roots that go down several feet. You must cut out about 6" of a meadow sod to get the stems of deep rooted plants such as burdock. One answer is to have a neighboring farmer bring in his land plows and turn over a large field, then disc it weekly till established plants are gone. This could take most of the summer. Then, plant an annual cover crop such as winter wheat or annual rye and have that disked in as a green manure before planting your wildflower meadow or putting in the pool and bog gardens.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print