Currmudgeon
Gold Member
I have about an acre of saplings and brush on my property. Unfortunately, the land is too rough to dare go in with a rotary cutter. The previous owner used it as a junkyard, so all the rough areas need to be explored for metal. This weekend, I recovered two, fifteen-foot long steel ladders, and two ten-foot lengths of 1-1/2 inch steel barstock. Real lawn mower eaters. The less said about the wire the better. /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif
Anyhow, the brush has to come out concurrently with the scrap.
The landscape rake will clean the light brush and weeds, but won’t handle the saplings. The log chain will uproot the saplings, but is time consuming. I decided to try using a subsoiler as a grubbing hook. TSC had one of their King Cutter units in stock, and the sum was out this weekend, so I decided to give it a try. It’s been a mixed success.
Spread rooted shrubs and saplings come out very easily. Just hook the tooth into the root wad, lift with the 3-point and drive away. It’s the tap rooted saplings that are a major pain. Skewering them is like trying to pick up marbles in the dark with an ice pick. Actually snagging the root, that you can’t actually see, is the major frustration. It would probably be easier to loosen around them with the hook and then log chain them out.
I discovered that I could drag a surprising number of improbable objects with the hook, until I got cocky and then everything stopped cooperating and ran from the hook. The hook is also useful for breaking up the blackberry thickets so I can landscape rake out the vines and roots.
The brushy areas are pretty rough, with random mounds about 18-inches high. That necessitated a lot of FEL work to flatten the mounds, fill the tractor flipping holes, and back blade everything roughly level. But the subsoiler made it an easy task for the JD-855 to level the ground.
In the process, the brush has snagged every single lynch pin and half the hair-pins out of my 3-point. The thing is now held together with double nutted capscrews and bent nails, and I’ve learned to assemble a 3-point hitch blindfolded. I’ll clean all that up when I switch back to the landscape rake. I also feel like a pretzel, having spent two days with my feet pointed forward, on the pedals, and my head pointed backward, staring between my back wheels.
Two more days of hooking, and I can switch back to the landscape rake and clean out the mess and maybe do a little fine grading.
Anyhow, the brush has to come out concurrently with the scrap.
The landscape rake will clean the light brush and weeds, but won’t handle the saplings. The log chain will uproot the saplings, but is time consuming. I decided to try using a subsoiler as a grubbing hook. TSC had one of their King Cutter units in stock, and the sum was out this weekend, so I decided to give it a try. It’s been a mixed success.
Spread rooted shrubs and saplings come out very easily. Just hook the tooth into the root wad, lift with the 3-point and drive away. It’s the tap rooted saplings that are a major pain. Skewering them is like trying to pick up marbles in the dark with an ice pick. Actually snagging the root, that you can’t actually see, is the major frustration. It would probably be easier to loosen around them with the hook and then log chain them out.
I discovered that I could drag a surprising number of improbable objects with the hook, until I got cocky and then everything stopped cooperating and ran from the hook. The hook is also useful for breaking up the blackberry thickets so I can landscape rake out the vines and roots.
The brushy areas are pretty rough, with random mounds about 18-inches high. That necessitated a lot of FEL work to flatten the mounds, fill the tractor flipping holes, and back blade everything roughly level. But the subsoiler made it an easy task for the JD-855 to level the ground.
In the process, the brush has snagged every single lynch pin and half the hair-pins out of my 3-point. The thing is now held together with double nutted capscrews and bent nails, and I’ve learned to assemble a 3-point hitch blindfolded. I’ll clean all that up when I switch back to the landscape rake. I also feel like a pretzel, having spent two days with my feet pointed forward, on the pedals, and my head pointed backward, staring between my back wheels.
Two more days of hooking, and I can switch back to the landscape rake and clean out the mess and maybe do a little fine grading.
