Tractor heritage, news and features

Hedging your bets

My other half loves his machines, and he can’t bear the thought of doing a job by hand when it would be possible to make/borrow/buy a tractor powered tool for the job. He also used to work as a groundsman, so he likes to see a neatly trimmed lawn and a tidy hedge. So he was soon to be seen going up and down the lane and around the edges of the fields on my MF 35 with the Teagle mounted on the back, tidying up the blackthorn hedges.

I’d much rather see one of these vintage hedge cutters in action rather than the menacing modern flails that are to be seen chewing up and spitting out our hedgerows. Alright I know you need something powerful if you are trimming hedges on a commercial scale, but no one can deny that those deafeningly loud state of the art flails do make an awful mess sometimes. Admittedly the mess usually occurs because the driver of the tractor is attempting to cut something with the flail that really should be tackled with a saw.

We have found that if we use the Teagle every year then all there is to trim is the soft bendy shoots, and the old machine snips through those a treat. What’s more, the gentle clickety-clack sound of the blades will scare neither nesting birds nor nervous old ladies. All the same, we aimed to get the job done before the birds start their building projects.

Teagle as a company have been around since 1944, and are still going strong today. They started life based around a family farm selling agricultural implements to farmers in the West Country, but today they export all over the world, and produce all manner of mowers, toppers, spreaders and etc. They do make a compact hedge cutter, that would no doubt fit my tractor just fine, but sorry Teagle, I won’t be buying one, because for what we want there’s nothing wrong with our old clickety clack model.

Sometimes I wonder at the wisdom of giving shed space to an implement that only gets used for a day a year, but like I said, the other half talks me into these things, and to be honest he’s probably right when it comes to this hedge cutter. In my childhood hedging was a job that took my dad ages to do by hand. My late father had asthma and the drugs he took for it had the side effect of making his skin very thin, which meant that he could cut himself very easily. Trimming blackthorn hedges and working with barbed wire were probably not the most suitable pursuits for someone with a condition like his, but my dad wasn’t the sort of person to be deterred by a bit of lacerated skin, so the days spent hedging and fencing usually resulted in him having a lot of blood pouring down his arms... So I’m sure that he’d approve of the old Teagle.

It’s funny the little family memories of growing up you have isn’t it? My dad had a thick head of black hair, and a big black beard, and he liked to wear a battered old dark leather cowboy hat. He was a soft hearted man, but to people who didn’t know him I’m sure he probably looked a bit um err, ‘untamed’! I laugh now to think what the passing tourists must have thought to see him, half in the hedge, with his big wild beard, armed with a bill-hook, and with his arms covered in blood!