Cleaning Underbrush; René Wolfram

Please imagine mass of tall unruly hedge plants!

For a week or so, I've been spending roughly an hour a day cleaning the underbrush at the southwestern part of the back yard.

Once upon a time, there was a line of thick hedge bushes in the area. But over the years, the hedge in the back has madly grown in every direction. The growth is actually more similar to individual spindly trees with a height of 15 - 20 feet.

(The hedge in the front on the south side has almost disappeared. And on the north side, it has become sparse and stunted and other plants have grown up along the line in a sporadic fashion. Along the back north side, it is virtually non-existent.)

Last year, I tried any number of methods of trimming. At one point, I was using the reciprocating saw to cut 20 or 30 plants at once. But that creates a huge mess than then has to be cut down to fit into the trash containers.

This time around, I'm trimming from the top of the plant down. So that when I do have to use the saw, it will be much easier to dispose of the pieces.

But what a tangle it is. I have to start on the outside and slowly work my way back to the original line. I've already had my first quick brush with poison ivy.

The south boundary contains a line of pines planted about every 15 feet. The hedge, along with other plants has grown in and around and outward from the pines.

I spent about 45 minutes trying to find a suitable image of what this looks like without success. As the graphic at the left suggests, you'll have to use your imagination.

René Wolfram Larger image

My search term was "hedge" which meant that any and everything and everybody showed up. The bushes were all magnificent rows trimmed to perfection or topiary wonders ranging from elephants to bunnies.

Serendipitously, I did encounter the very attractive man at the left, René Wolfram, at the German site www.hedge-trade.de . Rene is a "Trader & Technischer Analyst."

I ran the boxed text through AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation and got the following:

["Trading is an art! Over to be in the long term successful it requires more, than the reading of some stock exchange books, which promise the fast wealth with engmaschigen and unpractical beginnings. Important are thereby not only learning different techniques and beginnings, but above all handling losses and the active loss delimitation. Discipline is the highest requirement for a Trader and these to acquire is the largest challenge. It takes usually some years and one goes through very difficult phases with some setbacks, before one found the strategy optimal for itself. Most Trader does not come however into the phase, in which Trading really prepares joy, since they give up sometime unnerved."]

This also goes to show that the algorithms for image searching are lacking, or at least hard to manipulate. And it also shows that language translation methods are a tad shy of being flawlessness.

PAX! Erin Go Braugh!