I have written before about the joys of lawn mowing and the various beasts I had assembled around me for this very pleasurable pastime. Cutting the lawn is a pain in the bum with one of these:
I really cannot imagine why anyone would part with money to buy such a stupid bit of kit to even mow a lawn the size of a snooker table. But if you get some serious power assist things are really quite fun. My lawn mowing has changed a bit recently. Until a couple of weeks back my high end machine was this:
Shibaura SE4000 orchadised tractor running a three rotor 500 series Fieldmaster park mower. All very nice in a 42 horsepower sort of a way. But not really ideal for my property. On reflection I only cut grass like this because I had a tractor. It was beautifully noisy, very slow and had a turning circle of about a hundred yards. For reasons we needn't go into but involve inappropriate metal fatigue I decided to get rid of this and get something much more fun.
I now mow with one of these:
A Walker Super Bee with a 27 HP Kohler motor running a 60" deck. Faster than the tractor and parkmower, gives a better finish than the park mower and really is a 'zero turn ' machine. You can mow around a matchstick. It's not very noisy though.
However mowing is not the point of this post. If you glance back at the picture of the tractor you will see a very ragged and somewhat thinning shelterbelt in the background. Our property was once an orchard (kiwifruit) and although the vines were ripped out about four years ago we are left with the shleterbelts. And very nice they are as well. They really do shelter and give us a lot of privacy. However these things grow (trees do that, I read it in a book) and they need trimming as is evident from the picture above - and that was taken three months ago. I reckon I have about a kilometre of shelter belt that needs trimming (both sides and top) and I was not about to do that with a standard hedge trimmer was I? In fact I wasn't going to do it at all. After a lot of searching I found the shelterbelt trimmer man. He came and gave a quote and said he would arrive on Wednesday and he did.
Now I knew these blokes had cool bits of kit, but not this cool. He fronts up with one of these:
Four sodding great circular saws on a stick. In fact my bloke had five. 200HP tractor, clutch in the PTO and its all on for young and old. Noisy as all hell and and he's driving around with about thirty feet of mobile whirring death and destruction at his beck and call. I was scared fifty metres away from it. Once it gets up to its target it is just controlled arboreal mayhem. Fan-bloody-tastic. Branches the size of your thigh scythed off like bum fluff on a fifteen year old's chin. Branches and leaves flying through the air but mainly just lying compliantly on the ground at the foot of the hedge. Bits of conifer lying all over the shop - I've found trimmings thirty metres from the hedge. This wondrous Israeli bit of genius had all my trimming done in four hours. I have never seen anything like it. Trimming man then takes the cutting head off the tractor and puts a huge mulching mower on and reduces that which was hedge but half an hour ago into so much compost. At day's end he gives you an invoice and then drives off taking all his tree murdering kit with him with a cheery wave of the hand and 'I'll see you in two years'. Most fun couple of grand I've spent in ages.
Now he's gone it looks as though a marauding horde of Visigoths have been here for the afternoon - the place is a mess. But no matter, I reckon half a day wandering round with my weedy 6HP chipper and an air broom will have the place looking all ship shape again.
The Lotto people have an advert running along the lines of 'What would you do if you won this weekend?' Trips to Disney Land, buy a house for mum, leave work - all the usual suspects. Forget it, I know what I would do. I would have my shelterbets trimmed every week.
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