It was decided, in that place where what is decided must be, that the time had come to hack back the giant forsythia stand encroaching from the neighbor’s yard. The stuff tip-roots, so anything that stands in its way gets assimilated, and the only way to make headway is to tear it out by the roots.
We eventually clearcut a section about 15 feet wide and 40 feet long by the simple expedient of lopping off everything that stuck up:
Removing the roots required prying with a 7 foot length of 1.5 inch octagonal steel bar braced on a chunk of 4×4 inch lumber rammed up against the roots. With my full weight on a 6 foot lever arm, the roots would just barely break free.
A dozen wheelbarrow loads like this went atop the branches on the heap:
That’s my kind of outdoor work: kill them all…
Mary raked and seeded the debris field just before the next rainfall. It ought to be good for another few years.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
5 responses to “Forsythia Clearing”
Did you also convince Mary that you need a 10HP shredder? Maybe a DIY project!
The dataplate on our shredder proudly proclaims 5.5 HP, which is what it produces just before the engine explodes… exactly what would happen after ingesting one of those root balls!
We shred tree leaves into garden mulch, but that’s about as much as the poor thing can handle. You’re right: we need more power!
There are dozens of definitions of the horsepower – mechanical, metric, boiler, hydraulic, nominal, indicated, shaft, break,…. but at least, all of these are more or less defined.
…. and then, finally, there are marketing HP’s, which seem to bear no relationship at all to those other horsepower definitions…. :-) Your shredder seems to be rated in marketing HPs.
I was about to start a rant on horsepower vs. kW, but in this particular case, we’d probably end up with engineering kW and marketing kW…. (the last having no relationship with physical reality).
Sigh. What’s a girl to do? Especially if she wants a radio with a volume dial that goes up not to 10, but to 11?
Huh. I always thought that MktHP = 10 * StdHP, but maybe it’s more complex than that…
Somewhere out there, somebody makes a classy audio amp with a dial doing exactly that. Wish I could find the linkage…
Courtesy of XKCD – a power amp that goes up to 12…..
http://xkcd.com/670/
Alas. I’ve not yet succeeded in becoming one of those smart engineers…. :-(