- Joined
- Oct 25, 2004
- Messages
- 3,178
I'm back in blackberry hell.
The damnable things have spent a dry summer thriving like few living things can. The rain has begun again and just when I thought that they couldn't grow any faster, they have surprised me yet again.
I can't really cut them back during the summer. Between the flowers and the berries, the tangled masses belong to the bees, not me. Any cutting is greeted with a fusillade of stings so I'm forced to stand by and watch. Come October, the weather is cool and wet, the blossoms are gone and the berries nearly so, and my winged friends have better things to do with their time.
I'll never win against the blackberries. I learned that last winter and I'll learn it again this time around, no doubt. I can't hope to cut them all back to the property line; the best I can manage is to set them back a year for some breathing room and to make a couple of trails besides, and therein lies the tale.
I don't know the history of this property...neither does the landlady. I'm on a hillside with stepped sides and a flat area directly behind the house. This last slope forms a natural bulwark against the blackberry invasion and seems to be where one of the property's earlier owners decided to make their last stand. The lawnmower can keep them off the grass, but the slopes are too steep for mowers - this belongs to the blackberries. It didn't always.
There are a few groups of trees that stand like oases, blocking out all growth beneath them on account of their thick branches. When I first started cutting my paths I followed the contours of the land to the nearest tree stand, hoping that there wouldn't be any blackberries beneath. There weren't. What I found was the corner of the property, complete with the remains of a barbed wire fence. There's also a concrete well of some sort, littered with fragments of rotted and broken boards and half filled with dirt and leaves. This place looked very different once in the past. Today, it's quiet and dark. I rather like it. There's a certain magic to this one location that's hard to describe, almost like my own little bit of paradise in Silverdale.
Later paths extended to other bare spots. Over the summer the blackberries filled them in. My goal for this winter is to reopen them and, hopefully, run a path all the way down to the salmon stream at the bottom of the hill.
Yesterday I opened the first path with the Bob White Bolo. I left my gloves at home; I wanted to see how secure that grip was while covered with water, sweat, and blood. I also wanted to know if the blade was long enough to keep my swinging hand clear of the briars. (It wasn't quite long enough, hence the mention of blood on the handle.)
Somehow I injured my left hand previous to this exercise - not sure what's wrong or what I did but gripping a handle is suddenly very painful. The good news is that the BWB is light enough that my right arm never really got tired and there was no need to switch hands. I maintained a fairly constant rate of progress until I'd made it to the trees. The blade had no problems on the blackberries (regardless of whether they were fresh or had turned to wood); the occasional branch and ground strike didn't do much, either. What little it had dulled was easily fixed with a stropping afterwards. I suspect that most of this dulling was caused by being continuously wetted by water and sap for over an hour rather than any actual wear.
Today I went on to the second group of trees with the FF. No, it's not a brush cutter, but it's a general purpose design and general purpose around here means dealing with brush, something that I hadn't really tried with it. This time I wore gloves. (My right hand was running out of skin.) My left hand was better but still not up to any real work; the FF was light and balanced enough not to require switching hands. It seemed to clear the brush better than the BWB but my hand took a lot more abuse. The handle wasn't very secure with gloves on but they seldom are. A few swipes with the chakmak and some stropping restored the edge; again, I think corrosion had more to do with the dulling than anything else.
Slightly OT interjection: I'd given the FF's chakmak up for being too soft until I struck some sparks with it on a flint, showing that it was indeed hard enough. All of a sudden it seems to work fine for sharpening. A properly conducted double blind study with hard and soft chakmaks might be a worthwhile endeavor.
I wound up holding both of them pretty much the same way, with the butt of the handle in the palm of my hand. This maximized power and kept my hand as far away from the thorns as possible. I wouldn't use this grip on anything harder than brush as a rebound might be bad. This is asking for a hole in your palm when done with a standard khukuri grip without gloves but in the case of the BWB it felt very natural. That swell fits nicely in the palm.
I've noticed a new trend for HI blades in general to feature a hardened zone extending all the way to the tip. I think this is a good thing. My particular technique for cutting through blackberry brambles results in occasional ground strikes and dings on the tip; this time around, I didn't notice any dings, flat spots, or any other sort of damage on either tip, and both were hardened to the tip. Coincidence? I think not. Think what you want but I'm sold on the hardened tip.
In conclusion, both worked fine. Neither is ideal (longer is better on the brambles) but aside from the length, I have no complaints. This work probably tested me far more than it did the tools, though.
I'm going to try something new with the pics. Rather than insert one after every paragraph or two, I'm simply throwing them all into one folder, naming them sequentially, and letting them tell their own story. I sized them down to 640x480 and reduced the quality a bit to make them manageable; the way my camera likes to take pictures, they're larger than my monitor and well over 1.5 megs in size. (Sized down, they're only about 30-50k or so.) Setting things up like this makes my life far easier and between my ramble here and the pics themselves, things should make themselves clear.
Pics
Note: that hole in the ground is about the size of a human body. If I bump into a zombie wandering around in my woods, I'll know where it came from. (And where to return the pieces. Recycle, people.)
Another note: that barbed wire back there no longer serves any useful purpose and is a potential hazard to the children next door and the local wildlife. I intend to dispose of it eventually. You can imagine how I'm planning on doing that. Ought to be a good, historically significant series of tests.
Yet another note: the scale of the pictures is kind of hard to judge. It didn't occur to me to get myself in one of the pictures to show the size of them. They're level with my head in a lot of places. This was not easy work.
One final note: dig that wonderful purple tarnish on the BWB. "Working man's cold bluing" at its finest. Wet blackberry brambles produce one of the most attractive patinas that I have yet to see.
The last note: my hands are fine...itchy, but fine.
The damnable things have spent a dry summer thriving like few living things can. The rain has begun again and just when I thought that they couldn't grow any faster, they have surprised me yet again.
I can't really cut them back during the summer. Between the flowers and the berries, the tangled masses belong to the bees, not me. Any cutting is greeted with a fusillade of stings so I'm forced to stand by and watch. Come October, the weather is cool and wet, the blossoms are gone and the berries nearly so, and my winged friends have better things to do with their time.
I'll never win against the blackberries. I learned that last winter and I'll learn it again this time around, no doubt. I can't hope to cut them all back to the property line; the best I can manage is to set them back a year for some breathing room and to make a couple of trails besides, and therein lies the tale.
I don't know the history of this property...neither does the landlady. I'm on a hillside with stepped sides and a flat area directly behind the house. This last slope forms a natural bulwark against the blackberry invasion and seems to be where one of the property's earlier owners decided to make their last stand. The lawnmower can keep them off the grass, but the slopes are too steep for mowers - this belongs to the blackberries. It didn't always.
There are a few groups of trees that stand like oases, blocking out all growth beneath them on account of their thick branches. When I first started cutting my paths I followed the contours of the land to the nearest tree stand, hoping that there wouldn't be any blackberries beneath. There weren't. What I found was the corner of the property, complete with the remains of a barbed wire fence. There's also a concrete well of some sort, littered with fragments of rotted and broken boards and half filled with dirt and leaves. This place looked very different once in the past. Today, it's quiet and dark. I rather like it. There's a certain magic to this one location that's hard to describe, almost like my own little bit of paradise in Silverdale.
Later paths extended to other bare spots. Over the summer the blackberries filled them in. My goal for this winter is to reopen them and, hopefully, run a path all the way down to the salmon stream at the bottom of the hill.
Yesterday I opened the first path with the Bob White Bolo. I left my gloves at home; I wanted to see how secure that grip was while covered with water, sweat, and blood. I also wanted to know if the blade was long enough to keep my swinging hand clear of the briars. (It wasn't quite long enough, hence the mention of blood on the handle.)
Somehow I injured my left hand previous to this exercise - not sure what's wrong or what I did but gripping a handle is suddenly very painful. The good news is that the BWB is light enough that my right arm never really got tired and there was no need to switch hands. I maintained a fairly constant rate of progress until I'd made it to the trees. The blade had no problems on the blackberries (regardless of whether they were fresh or had turned to wood); the occasional branch and ground strike didn't do much, either. What little it had dulled was easily fixed with a stropping afterwards. I suspect that most of this dulling was caused by being continuously wetted by water and sap for over an hour rather than any actual wear.
Today I went on to the second group of trees with the FF. No, it's not a brush cutter, but it's a general purpose design and general purpose around here means dealing with brush, something that I hadn't really tried with it. This time I wore gloves. (My right hand was running out of skin.) My left hand was better but still not up to any real work; the FF was light and balanced enough not to require switching hands. It seemed to clear the brush better than the BWB but my hand took a lot more abuse. The handle wasn't very secure with gloves on but they seldom are. A few swipes with the chakmak and some stropping restored the edge; again, I think corrosion had more to do with the dulling than anything else.
Slightly OT interjection: I'd given the FF's chakmak up for being too soft until I struck some sparks with it on a flint, showing that it was indeed hard enough. All of a sudden it seems to work fine for sharpening. A properly conducted double blind study with hard and soft chakmaks might be a worthwhile endeavor.
I wound up holding both of them pretty much the same way, with the butt of the handle in the palm of my hand. This maximized power and kept my hand as far away from the thorns as possible. I wouldn't use this grip on anything harder than brush as a rebound might be bad. This is asking for a hole in your palm when done with a standard khukuri grip without gloves but in the case of the BWB it felt very natural. That swell fits nicely in the palm.
I've noticed a new trend for HI blades in general to feature a hardened zone extending all the way to the tip. I think this is a good thing. My particular technique for cutting through blackberry brambles results in occasional ground strikes and dings on the tip; this time around, I didn't notice any dings, flat spots, or any other sort of damage on either tip, and both were hardened to the tip. Coincidence? I think not. Think what you want but I'm sold on the hardened tip.
In conclusion, both worked fine. Neither is ideal (longer is better on the brambles) but aside from the length, I have no complaints. This work probably tested me far more than it did the tools, though.
I'm going to try something new with the pics. Rather than insert one after every paragraph or two, I'm simply throwing them all into one folder, naming them sequentially, and letting them tell their own story. I sized them down to 640x480 and reduced the quality a bit to make them manageable; the way my camera likes to take pictures, they're larger than my monitor and well over 1.5 megs in size. (Sized down, they're only about 30-50k or so.) Setting things up like this makes my life far easier and between my ramble here and the pics themselves, things should make themselves clear.
Pics
Note: that hole in the ground is about the size of a human body. If I bump into a zombie wandering around in my woods, I'll know where it came from. (And where to return the pieces. Recycle, people.)
Another note: that barbed wire back there no longer serves any useful purpose and is a potential hazard to the children next door and the local wildlife. I intend to dispose of it eventually. You can imagine how I'm planning on doing that. Ought to be a good, historically significant series of tests.
Yet another note: the scale of the pictures is kind of hard to judge. It didn't occur to me to get myself in one of the pictures to show the size of them. They're level with my head in a lot of places. This was not easy work.
One final note: dig that wonderful purple tarnish on the BWB. "Working man's cold bluing" at its finest. Wet blackberry brambles produce one of the most attractive patinas that I have yet to see.
The last note: my hands are fine...itchy, but fine.
:thumbup: 