I live in a small mountain town and I want to show you my flying field, hear your thoughts and find out if anyone else has had a similar journey in building his own field. It's not a fancy field like clubs have just a minimum place where I can fly my planes in good conditions since I'm the only one in my town with rc planes.
After many years of breaking wheels on gras, waiting for people to mow their fields so I could make some flights until the grass grew again, I decided to make my own field. I've searched A LOT to find the owner of one that is not to far and not to close to the town since I don't have a car, so I could carry even my gas planes by hand. I found and rent a field of 200x15 meters with grass on it, pretty rough, in no condition to roll rc plane wheels so I knew I have to flatten it out somehow.
After hearing some people advices I decided to find someone with a tractor and plough it so I could level it after that. After months of searching and mostly waiting a tractor guy to find time for me, I manage to make the grass field into a dirt field. Then I saw a 3,5 tons road roller working in town so I ask him to flatten my field. Which he did..and it came amazingly flat. But not for long...I knew weeds will grow, so I bought 6kg of grass seeds and throw them on the field so I would have grass. I also bought a manual grass mower that I could keep in my appartment. It did grow some nice grass..but nothing compared to the weeds, they exploded!
In a few weeks the soil looked like a potato plantation in full season! So the only way of making the soil practical for flight again was to spray with total herbicide that killed everything and I could fly on the dirt again. And repeated that a few times during each season since then. I have to carry a lot of water by bike to have a quite reasonable flying field that I can fly on. I was thinking of planting a lot of grass and make it green like a real flying field but I have no condition and intention to mow it weekly with a gas powered mower that I couldn't keep in my appartment.
Last summer I've made it table clean and after a month of rain I didn't recognize it. The weeds were 1m tall and finger thick. I had to buy a grass trimmer to get rid of them. That was the moment when I decided to find another herbicide. I've also made myself a roller to flatten it from time to time, and made it from the biggest PVC pipe that I've found, the 50cm diameter one and 50cm long, with removable caps made from wood and a handle. I thought that it has to be filled with something that I have at the field...dirt. So empty has 15kg and filled with dirt I think it's over 100kg. After winter, the dirt field has much roughness so when I throw the roller in..it shows! In the future I want to plant a 2meter wide band of grass on each side of the field and keep it mowed so I can stay on the gras and to have the dirt runway in the middle. I think it will look nice too.
During the winter, I flatten the snow with a snow shovel with some snow bags on it to be heavy, so in a couple of hours I have a snow field on which gas airplane skis don't plunge in. And it's a lot of fun on snow! Did any of you have done something similar? I post some photos with different stages of the field.
My Cessna on snow -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGyoiWCIg2g&t=133s