Relative Something

Saturday we woke to an unpleasant surprise. Peering out our bedroom door to the deck, I discovered one of the pine trees at the bottom of the hill was leaning severely. Closer inspection revealed that there were two trees tipping over.

My first thought was that it might be the result of deer pushing on them, mainly because of the fact it was more than one tree. However, when I stepped near the first tree, I decided it was more likely a function of the soil being completely water-logged. Those tree roots were trying to hang on to ground that was like a thick soup.

We tried pushing them back as close to upright as possible, and then tied them to some T-bar fence posts that we had from the old fence that was pulled out last fall. It was a little tricky, because the posts have to get pounded down into the same soup that wasn’t good enough to hold the tree roots. I started at an opposite angle with the fence posts, but once tension was put on them, they moved to almost straight up.

It seemed to work for the time being, so we wandered off to the next project. We started the pile of tree roots on fire again, and raked out the ground on about half of the labyrinth. We wrestled with trying to move some boulders by hand, using pry bars, but we weren’t very successful. Lastly, we did a little work on the spot by the barn door where today we plan to host our fence contractor and his skid loader, to dig out the berm and open up a driving lane behind the barn.

Ironically, we need to uproot a perfectly happy pine tree, and relocate him to clear the way. I expect we will be staking one more tree, before the end of the day.