At this time of year, just one week now before Barn Dance, Sturts Farm is overtaken by a general frenzy of lawn mowing, hedge trimming, strimming and even power washing. In these critical two weeks we probably burn more fossil fuel than in the whole of the rest of the summer. Suddenly the farmyard is almost sparkling clean, the hedges have pulled themselves together, the car park is free from weeds, the village green is short and striped and even Neill’s flowerbed is nearly ready for public viewing.
I was feeling a bit left out from all this tidying up, as so far our contribution from the garden team has been to carry on hoeing the carrots in Sunny Acres and try to pretend nothing unusual is going on. But yesterday Sebastian taught me how to use the topper. The topper is basically a big lawnmower that goes on the back of the tractor. You are meant to use it to tidy up a field after the cows have been grazing; it cuts down any tufty grass, thistles, docks and such like that the cows didn’t fancy eating, and helps to stop the pasture being taken over by inedible weeds. It is less dangerous and less precise than the actual mower on the tractor that we use for cutting the grass to make hay or silage. In the garden, Henning has traditionally used the topper to roughly mow the grass round the edge of the field, on the headlands, and also the green manure leys.
Topping has been on my to do list for a couple of weeks at least, but somehow never quite happened. It nearly didn’t happen yesterday either; just hitching the machine up to the tractor proved fraught with difficulties. First of all I had to tie the link arms of the tractor together with baler twine to get them lined up with machine properly, then the top link on the tractor was too long, so I swapped it for another one which then didn’t have the right size pin, and when I stole a pin off another tractor, the PTO was stuck and wouldn’t lengthen to reach the tractor. Sebastian very patiently helped me through all these calamities and also managed to unstick the PTO by taking it off the tractor, hanging it up on a chain and attaching a heavy weight on the other end of it. Anyway, eventually we got started, and then I spent most of the rest of the day driving round and round the garden and Sunny Acres encased in my ear defenders, topping.
In a way it seems sad and wrong to expend a lot of time and energy cutting down the joyful profusion of growing greenery round the edges of the fields and in the weedy patches that never got sown with green manure, turning them in to something flat and civilised. At one point on the far side of the potatoes I was driving through amazing grass taller than the bonnet of the tractor. In the weed patch between Eden’s grain and his carrots, the grass seed heads were waving in a beautiful wide sea in a dozen hues of grey and brown and purple. William asked me why I was topping at all, and Sebastian persuaded me not to do the bit beyond the hedge in the garden where the poppies are growing. There is, I think, though, something right and satisfying in finding order and edges, cutting down the thistles before they seed everywhere, keeping the brambles and bracken in the field edges at bay.
Perhaps there are different ways of approaching it through. I’d like to buy a scythe one day. And I have a vision of gardening smaller and more intimately, where, if you don’t use a tractor, you don’t need a big wide headland for turning around in, which means you don’t have even half as much grass to keep mowing. And perhaps a garden that is less flat and straight in its own right too; a garden in three dimensions instead of two.
