i have been drooling over tractors...
forces within and beyond my control have me in regular pain that occasionally borders on debilitating. i've been too manly with too many logs. that pain has come and gone ever since i worked for the tree trimming company in northampton, ma, at age 20, when i put in extra log-chucking effort to prove a college boy from the far west could chuck logs as fast and far as a new england redneck - for seven fifty an hour. some of those fellas were all right and some of them were total choades; but at any rate i fit in with wry or dim, grouchy/smiley, sore backed sawyers that much better for it - and that is priceless.
and i'd fit in better with all kinds of work-aware people if i had a smart little, small/midsized four wheel drive tractor with a four-in-one bucket and a hoe with the thumb. that'd have my work here finished a lot quicker on this north facing slope of a gulch... i've cut a road down into it, a long shanked z with a teardrop turn-around at the end. in the center of the teardrop is a gnarly old mango that was burned and rotted hollow... the land mauka of that, up the slope, was pasture when the long gone house there was in use... since, roseaple, a'wai wi, guava, java plum and eucalyptus filled in to fully wood the landscape.
then my family and our houses appeared up hill from there and brought another thirty one years of change, the last nine of which have had me back as an adult, often spending days chipping away at the landscape. i've left most of the large trees and cut most of the small ones out to make way for fruit bearers, timber producers, garden beds and a coop, ropeswings and a small bamboo plantation... it's on the verge of seeming "finished" which is to say, stable; rooted into a predictable pattern of succession and growth.
i've been creating a food forest, a deliberate jungle. so far i've done it all with pick and shovel, seeds, cuttings and the occasional high priced specimen, and once in a while hiring a mini excavator, bobcat loader, backhoe, tractor or wood chipper to come in and effect a major change. and now that i've made it all accessible, i see the final push, there could be a succession of the smaller plant life around the whole place now; the big trees are all in place over some two acres, seedling, stalk, clump or giant, now it's time to look at some of the finer points around the design; the groundcovers, the garden beds, the jade vines and sitting areas...
time also to cut out the rest of the dying roseapples, six(?) years deep into the "ohia rust" epidemic and they are all but withered and rotted, silvery mossy trunks with their great fans of super climbable branches - leafless. the trees i learned to climb with near-monkey confidence, thirty feet tall and dominant in our gulch, all but dead. time to pull them down, make use of their wood and make use of their space. time to get rid of all the philodendron vines and common yellow ginger and elephant ear, time for water features stocked with catfish and maybe a shed for that tractor, big and over-built, with bouys hanging from the eves and a workbench at the back...
