| On An Olive
Farm In Spain |
| Zen And
The Art Of Gorse Clearance |
| By Paul Read |
| Lets try
and be positive about this. Gorse can provide a useful sanctuary for
some animals and birds, I’ve seen toads and wasps for example happily co-existing
within this hardy plant. Its presence, one has to admit prevents soil erosion
in places that perhaps few other plants would grow. And it provides the
rocky dry valley slopes of Granada’s coastal strip with a pleasant green
appearance. But, alas this is about as positive as I can be because I have
almost 10.000sqm of the stuff, and for me, that’s 10.000sqm too much. It
has completely overtaken the abandoned olive farm that I´ve just
acquired. So much so, that in places the stuff is taller than I am. So
thick and impenetrable is the gorse that most of the land is inaccessible.
The olives are slowly stranguled, whilst the encinas and alcornoques, the
pines and wild palms fight daily for access to sunlight. And down at ground
level where no light can enter, almost nothing else survives. |
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| So I sought
a solution to the problem, and in the 3-step process I came across a little
enlightenment.
STEP 1:
Vehicle power: At the beginning I consulted my older and wiser neighbours
about the problem: “Get in a man and a digger and it’ll be clear in
a day or two,” advised one. “It’ll cost mind you, but there’s no
other way”. But I had seen what these machines could do. Another neighbour
had recently cleared land for a new road, and in the wake of the noisy
machine everything was removed, the struggling olives and oaks, the wild
lavender and thyme and most sadly of all was the demolition of the old
stone walling that supported the ancient terraces hidden beneath the jungle
of gorse. And once the machine had upped and gone, the gorse had been left
in heaps amongst soil and rock at the side of the road. This seemed a fire
hazard as well as slovenly work. There had to be another way.
STEP 2:
Mobile machinery: Instead of getting in a digger we borrowed a powerful
petrol driven strimmer with a deadly looking blade attachment that looked
like a giant Ninja’s shuriken. |
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| Just looking
at this machine got me excited - lean, mean and ready to discriminate between
weeds and walls. However the recommended uniform proved not so attractive.
A welders facemask, cycling helmet, gloves, boots and the obligatory blue
boiler suit. Fortunately I wasn’t expecting visitors that day. I donned
the many layers and enthusiastically got to work. I calculated that about
2 or three weeks of effortless strimming and happy whistling whilst I worked
would clear the bulk of the land.
After 2 hours
my hands were numb with the vibration of the machine. My ears were ringing
with the sound of the engine.
My entire body
was sweating profusely and vibrating even though the machine was now switched
off. My face mask had steamed up long ago and I could no longer make out
where I was, what I was cutting down or even on whose land I had indeed
been cutting. |
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Offshore Resources Gallery
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| I had disturbed
numerous wasps nests (they were not amused) and been bitten by every
insect small enough to be able to creep up my trouser leg, sleeve or face
mask. In the madness that consumes you when the adrenalin flows and cutting
fever grips, the machine failed to discriminate between large stalks of
gorse and young oak, pine and even olives attempting to break through to
the surface. I had chopped off a number of small struggling trees, lavender
bushes and palms and I felt guilty. Was the steamed up mask to blame or
my blind enthusiasm to clear the land? And how much land had I indeed cleared
over the two hours? No more than perhaps 10sqm! At this rate it would take
2000 hours to clear the land! At 4 hours a day that’s 500 days! I wasn’t
sure I could borrow the machine for that long.
And how efficiently
was the land cleared? Looking back over the metres of ground I had cleared,
the stalks of the gorse were still there where the slope of the ground
had prevented me from cutting close - and everywhere there were random
piles of the stuff drifting about. I would have to go back over it all
with some hand tool. Then there was the noise and petrol pollution to take
into account and whether my bones could cope with another 1998 shuddering
hours. Overall not a very satisfactory method. |
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| Step two
had indeed brought me nearer my goal, though I think that the light
was still some way away in the proverbial poly-tunnel. It would take several
madder machine moments before the simple and the obvious would present
themselves to me. Like most of the more profound lessons we learn in life,
proximity to the problem only obscures the answer.
STEP 3:
Back to basics: Forced to return the machine after two weeks of crazed
cutting I had a convenient break to sit back and review the problem. There
still remained over 99% of land untouched. Perhaps not all of it needed
to be cut? Perhaps I should concentrate on just reaching the trees and
releasing them from their spiny prisons? If, as I worked my way through
I could change direction as and when I came across a species I wanted to
keep, surely that would be a better way to proceed? But how and with what
tool? Enter the long-handled cutters: Silent, light weight, no special
masks, no petrol fumes or blue clothes and with these cutters you can reach
right into the bush, snip from the |
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| ground at
the main trunk of the plant and haul it to one side. Instead of hacking
blindly through every stem and branch of each plant, select the main trunk
only and hey presto! Up comes an entire bush each time. Toss it to one
side and move on. After a couple of hours I had managed to cut a path between
several trees. I wasn’t sweating, nor had I accidentally cut down anything
I wanted to keep. Ok, I wouldn’t clear the whole lot before lunch, but
at least this way it was enjoyable, I thought about what I was doing, and
I noticed and learnt about the things I worked alongside - the spiders
and the toads, the preying mantis and the lizards. All could be encouraged
to move, rather than dismembered and spun off into the air in a thousand
fragments.
Had I reached
enlightment?
Not just
yet. And so work continued at a slow but thoughtful pace. Asking one
neighbour what to do with the cuttings he said lob them onto another neighbours
land or onto the “parque natural” that borders two sides of us.
Such advice was beginning to tire me a little. Where were the wise old
men of romantic Mediterranean novels with scrunched up paper faces and
words of wisdom pouring forth from their leathery lips? Still, I was determined
to do something other than just lob the residue onto my neighbours land.
The cuttings could be kept and mulched down over the year, provided they
were kept weighed down. (A lesson well learnt after a many windy night
and the following morning spent scouring the hills collecting up the tangled
bushes out of my neighbours olive trees). And the fine thick stems
can be cut off and kept as firewood for the log burning stove…
Where the ground
has been left with a slight covering of this broken down material, new
growth is now coming thorough (and very few gorse, so few that they
can be snipped or even pulled up by hand as they are spotted). There
are now wild palms, wild grape, lavender, thyme, star clover, wild pea,
fennel and mint and this is just 8 months later.
And Thus
To Enlightenment
1. The
more you know the less you learn.
2. Less
haste, more speed.
3. Beware
the presence of leathery lips.
To contact
Paul Click Here
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