Power Down
Murray goes for a DIY clean sweep.
Sweeping up a broom problem
Broom is a perennial problem here. Most people spray it.
It took me three days and four iterations to build a proper broom-puller. I built a Mark 1 puller a few years ago, but there was room for improvement. By the time the improvements were in place only one original part remained, and the whole contraption was doing the job in a completely different way.
The problem is simple. You must clamp the stem of the bush firmly, pull it up, then release it. The puller must be robust, yet light enough to carry around the hills. Ideally, the clamping and the pulling should be combined in one motion.
It’s easier said than done. Mark 1 had a sharpened ‘ V’ cut into an aluminium channel. If the broom stem jammed in the ‘ V’, all went well. That usually meant holding the bush in my left hand and pulling it towards me to stop it slipping.
My first thoughts were a jaw or hook of some kind to pull the stem into the ‘ V’. Making that movement precede the upward pull, while not having separate levers for both actions, was a brain teaser.
There was a lot of thinking and timewasting involved in getting it right. I began with an existing jaw from a cheap wood clamp. Sliding it in and out was straightforward enough. But when it came under tension, the wood clamp objected. It bent upwards and refused to slide. It was replaced by something beefier.
Then the beefier jaw started bending downwards at the stem-grabbing end. It was braced.
Our Border Collie, Zeb, quickly got into the rhythm of this project:
• off we go to pull a few bushes;
• back we come to the workshop;
• Dad makes some noise;
• off we go to pull a few more bushes;
• back to the workshop.
Then I surprised him. Nothing broke, nothing bent. The Mark 2 grabbed, pulled, released, grabbed, pulled, released. It’s all you can ask of a broom-puller.
While all this was going on, a helicopter hovered over the neighbouring property, spraying gorse. This process burns never-to-be-had-again fossil energy, releases CO₂, and does so on behalf of an agriculture system which does the same.
It’s unsustainable, even in the medium term. The jury is out about the effects of the spray, but a good rule of thumb is that you can’t do any damage to soil biochemistry by not spraying. It’s guaranteed.
I’d also confidently bet on our earthworm-per-acre count being superior to that of a sprayed environment.
I think I’m ahead. It’s a beautiful thing pulling the roots out cleanly while leaving the soil intact.
While I worked, I was thinking about US farmer and author Joel Salatin. I’ve been reading a couple of his books. There’s a lot we don’t have in common. But things we do agree on include low-tech manual tools, small-scale biodiversity, low-energy inputs and local produce consumed locally. We agree that glasshouses extend cold-climate growing seasons, but that you still need to rotate the contained crops and nurture the soil. We agree that corporate agriculture is all about the bottom line and has forgotten that farming was once about growing nutritious food.
We agree that our current lifestyle is temporary. He’s a thought-provoking read.
It is good to have things to constructively occupy your mind when you’re broom-pulling. I’m dreaming of an apple press for next summer, a glasshouse built out of spare windows, a mulcher, composting, and firewood.
Just a man of means by no means, pulling broom for a couple of hours in the weak southern sunshine.