Roadside mowing

It pleases me to see roadsides being mown this time of year.One reason is nostalgia for my teenage summer days driving a Farmall (or, one season, a John Deere with a hand clutch) and cutting hayfields and old pastures. 

Another reason is the mowing sometimes exposes stone walls and other roadside features that tell a story.

The best reason is, without the mowing, roadside vegetation quickly creeps close to the pavement or gravel.

Some complain that the mowing wastes money and gasoline and impedes Nature.

But keeping the sumac and Joe Pye weed and thistles back improves Nature’s chances of surviving. Squirrels, chipmunks, foxes, woodchucks, possums and raccoons can see our cars and trucks coming and wait before crossing. And conversely, we have a better chance of seeing them and slowing down.

I don’t include turtles on this list because I doubt they pay any attention to what is in front of them. They’re just little tanks that think they can go anywhere. Or they can’t see very well from so low down.

Much roadside trimming is done with rotary mowers these days. Some rotary mowers are on the rear of the tractor, some on the right side and some on hydraulic arms with a good reach.

In my experience, a rotary brushcutter could be hooked up to the tractor for aggressive pastures, but otherwise, it had a cutterbar off the rear on the right side.

It was important to avoid limbs and rocks and iron fence posts, lest one of the teeth be knocked out of the cutterbar. If you are mowing a field and one of the knives breaks, you leave a ridge as you go. It looks silly, unsightly, wasteful. 

A sicklebar needs regular maintenance. Meaning, the bar with the triangular knives has to be removed and locked into a vice in the workshop and each knife individually sharpened with a stone or file.

Sickle knives have to be removed or restored to the machine ever so carefully. In a real pinch,  i.e. a long way from the workshop,  I could remove a sicklebar in the field and try to chisel off the rivets, put in a new blade and pound in new rivets. Took too much time, and there were too many menacing knife blades threatening my hands.

The writer is senior associate editor of this newspaper.