Posts Tagged ‘clearing branches’
Reclaiming Space
Picking up where we left off over a month ago, this past weekend we resumed cutting away at the tangle of growth along the hedge wall of our north property line.
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It’s rewarding work, despite how frustrating it is to deal with so many twisted branches locked together by vines. I am forever baffled by how much resistance the littlest of branches offer against attempts to pull them apart.
Usually, the key is to push them further together in order to reposition the catch points before pulling them apart, but that is counterintuitive to the goal of separating them. The natural inclination is to try pulling harder in the assumption that arm muscle is significantly more powerful than the spindly twig junctions.
Now our perimeter walks around the property with Delilah can follow right beside the old barbed wire fence on that length of our north loop.
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Clearing Branches
For almost a year the branches lay in the section of woods beside our driveway, between the house and the barn. They were from a large oak tree that was already misshapen by previous storm damage. The lopsided section that had mostly survived the first incident many years before, tipped over about two stories high and required professional help to bring down the rest of the way.
I had the tree service do the minimum work of bringing the tree to the ground, but nothing more. We could do the rest.
Talk is cheap.
There was a lot of work left to be done, which is why it has taken almost a full year to come close to finishing the dispatching of all those logs and branches away from the scene. Yesterday, in the last days before the woods will become thick with green leaves, Cyndie and I finally cleaned up the area where the debris was spread.
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And we are not even done yet. There remain many standing trees with red paint on them which the DNR forester marked as threatening to the health of larger oaks around them.
Today’s inspiration is to cut those down and use the biggest sections to replace the creosote-soaked fence posts in our garden terrace walls. It will mean the wall won’t last as long since the tree trunks will rot sooner than the fence posts, but we think they will last long enough to allow collecting rocks for reinforcement over time.
I know cutting more trees down will create a lot more branches that need to be dealt with, but while we are in that mode I’m hoping momentum will keep progress flowing and not leave them laying in place for a whole year.
The challenge will be in splitting time between working on the garden terraces and clearing the new piles of branches created.
This will not be a one-day project, we know that much.
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Relative Something 