As I look down in the ravine behind our home in Roanoke, Virginia, I am impressed more by the clearing that has survived for several years among the towering poplar and walnut trees than I am by the new spring colors.
I worked hard for that tiny clearing, and I will make sure it stays relatively clear of brush.
It has not been that many years since I was proud to working the land.
We sold the last cattle on our farm in Canada in 1982. Since then our farming has consisted of growing a few tomato plants in the shadow of our homes.
Still the lessons learned on the farm make looking into the ravine behind our home different for me than it is for many people. While it is popular to talk about working with nature and being friendly to nature, I know that without a lot of effort on our part, mother nature will quickly take back land that has been cleared.
On our farm in Canada, I had to run a bush hog around the edges of the pastures every year or two. The cattle would eat the hardwood seedlings that popped up, but the spruce trees were a different story. If you left them alone your pasture would quickly become a spruce forest.
Something over ten years ago, the ravine behind our home had become a forest of small shrubs. Many of them were eight to ten feet high, and there was very little cleared ground. I took it on myself to clear the ground. My spare time for months was devoted to cutting brush. I cut much of it with a chain saw, and the rest of it with a brush cutter or my trusty weed whip.
Our back forty in the ravine has always been a challenge. Just keeping the brush knocked down has been a lot of work, and only this year have I started looking for someone to follow-up on my work. I no longer want to be cutting brush on a hill where you can barely stand up. Just knocking the weeds down on the bank is now a big enough challenge for me.
I think many people living on lots which back up on some woods or wild lands have an idea that nature will take back that which we do not fight to keep. There are a lot of folks today whose manicured lots have very little to do with battling nature. It they have woods, they leave them alone.
I can remember my mother, who was born in 1910, talking about their "yard." It was actually just an area of packed dirt around their home. They kept it clean by sweeping it with a corn straw broom.
Now there is a whole industry which has grown up around keeping yards green and well trimmed. While I like mowing yards because it reminds me of cutting hay fields, I am still surprised at how many people are involved in keeping the country manicured.
My mother loved to plant flowers, but I think she enjoyed wild ones even more. She once created a small wild flower garden, but the plants being wild refused to stay within their boundaries.
It does not take much of a jump for me to go from clearing brush to clearing a field for planting or breaking ground for a new garden. I have owned a few old farms over the years, and I was proud to rescue some great fields from neglect. There was a lot more back breaking work to it than you might think. Once alders or small brush get in a field, they have to worked out of the ground. You also end up hauling off a few years worth of stones that the frost might have worked to the top of the ground.
While you could easily get brush out with machinery, rocks were often picked by hand. Then the field would require, lime, fertilizer and seed to get it back in production. On our Canadian farm, we would plant a nurse crop of oats over a standard hayfield seeding of timothy and red clover. In the late fall I would chop the green oats as feed for our cattle.
We are getting ready to take out some holly bushes in front of our home. I suspect that is about as close to clearing land as I can get here on our mountainside Virginia homestead.
Our yard is not going back to the packed dirt of one hundred years ago, but we will have some plants that we can actually work with instead of giant holly bushes that defy most efforts to work with them.
