I’m discovering that farming is a slippery slope.  When I bought a string trimmer (weed whacker in the vernacular) a number of years ago, the dealer mentioned that the model I was buying could also be fitted with a rigid blade.  My reaction at the time was utter horror at the idea of a large saw blade spinning at the end of a pole that I was holding, but I thanked him for the information.  Then last fall I had the Incident with the Rose Bush; I realized that I needed to do something about the multiflora rose thickets proliferating on the farm before they killed all my sheep.  I started out attacking the thorned menaces with a set of loppers and heavy gloves, but I soon realized that I would either die of blood loss or old age before I made a dent in the invading roses.

As I plotted and planned over the winter, the spinning blade on the stick started to sound less frightening and more appealing, and today I screwed up my courage and tried it.

The blade is good.

This is one of the smaller clumps of multiflora rose, and it was vanquished in an instant.

The catch now is that I don’t have a fancy gas-powered machine that will gather the cut rose stems and move them into a burn pile, so tomorrow I’ll go looking for better gloves, and perhaps a helper.