Posts Tagged ‘pruning trees’
Harvesting Popsicles
It’s still February on the calendar, but our warm days have started the sap flowing in the trees already. As a result, the leaking wounds on our recently pruned maple trees are forming sap-sicles with a sublime sweetness and hint of maple flavor.
The daytime temperature yesterday reached the melting point and the mostly sunny sky created the magical act of disappearing snow. I pulled the drifted snow off the roof over the front door and along the valleys beneath the main peak and the shingles started steaming instantly as they absorbed the solar energy and warmed up.
I had started the day with a walk down the driveway to assess the condition and found it to be a frozen mess. The snow that fell during the second half of the storm, after I had plowed once, was melting into a slush that had re-frozen overnight into an un-plowable mass.
That shifted my morning focus to shoveling. By the time I got to plowing in the afternoon, much of the driveway was exposed pavement. I cleaned up the edges, battling to keep the blade from slicing into the soft turf, and then worked on the gravel section around the barn.
That was a trick. The snow was sticky and the gravel soft. The task gets a bit less forgiving, requiring more attention to detail than I really wanted to give it. It becomes a mental wrestle to convince myself the chore even needs to be done, and if so, how thorough to follow through.
Do I need to leave space for more snow to follow? Will this be melted and gone by the time we next receive another plowable amount of accumulation?
I parked the Grizzly in the sunshine to melt the snow off the blade while I pulled out a shovel to clean up the edges. That’s when some maple-sicles caught my eye.
The first bites at the bottom are the sweetest and the texture is softer than frozen water. There is no question that these are not typical icicles. The hint of maple flavor is a wonderful natural reward.
I wonder how many grams of sugar I added to my diet yesterday.
That’s not counting the icing I ate on the couple of pieces of Cyndie’s spice cake I snuck in…
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Additional Artistry
Day two of tree trimming picked up right where they left off the day before. They breezed through the tasks I had planned so efficiently that I was able to add a few bonus trees to what I originally expected possible. Even with that, they finished before the end of the day and credited the invoice for the shortened time.
I heartily endorse the work of JCE Tree Service out of River Falls, WI. Tree Cutters, Matt and Dan, represented both their company and their profession impressively well. These guys are visionaries. I like to refer to tree trimmers as artists for the beauty they enhance from living trees, or the improvements they create in a stand by removing dead ones.
The task of thinning a busy tree is a daunting one. There are so many cuts that will need to happen, but it is a process that has to occur in individual steps. Once they are up in the middle branches, they must keep in mind the perspective of the whole tree as it appears from the ground, while they survey and select from the relative limited views up close.
Some decisions are obvious, but more often they are not, so these guys are performing a constant analysis while they work. It is a fantastic performance of physical labor, mental processing, and creative artistry.
It would be very easy to get carried away and make an ill-advised cut. Think: bad haircut.
I’m happy to report that our trees all look fantastic. It amazes me to see a tree that looks perfectly normal with as many pruned branches laying beneath it as there are still attached overhead.
As I’ve already written, I asked them to focus on cutting and not bother with cleaning up what is on the ground. It definitely helped to speed up their accomplishments, as they got everything done that I wanted, and more. Walking the trails with Cyndie to review the work at the end of the day, I got a sense of the amount of work I have created for us by that plan.
That’s okay. The work will be a labor of love. We will have a nice supply of wood chips for our trails and firewood to split and burn in the fireplace.
Best of all, the trees on our property which have been nagging me for attention for years will instead, now bring me great joy every time I see them and walk beneath them.
Thank you, Dan, Matt, & JCE Tree Service. Job well done!
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Forest Cleaning
It wasn’t too muddy beyond our trails, among the leaves carpeting our woods, so we took advantage of the favorable weather and did some “forest-keeping” yesterday. Since we were already picking up the branches I had pruned from trees, we got inspired to keep going and clean up some of the years of accumulated fallen limbs and dead growth.
It’s like magic. Once you decide to start picking up branches, there suddenly becomes more branches deserving to be picked up.
We collected a wide variety of them into piles at the side of our trail, to make it easy for chipping later. We can grind them up right where they lay and spread them out to pave the trail for better footing during the muddy season.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could bring the tractor in there now? But the ground is too soft for the time being.
Timing is everything.
While picking up some branches that had lain there for years, I found myself wondering how I would know when enough was enough. It looked really good in the areas we had cleared, but I felt a desire to avoid trying to make it too pristine.
Cyndie agreed with me that we should seek a good balance of making it look well-tended, while maintaining a certain amount of natural character from the few oddities of limbs or saplings that grow askew or have reason to fall.
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Relative Something 