Relative Something

It is the month of May, after all, so it comes as no surprise that when the precipitation pauses, and the sun peeks out, the snow melts very quickly. The first order of business for me was to try to salvage or mend the damaged trees.

Using a pruning saw on the end of a telescoping pole, I gave my arms a workout, cutting broken branches back to the main trunk of otherwise intact trees.

This image shows how the damage varies, and can be easily overlooked, if you only scout for obviously broken limbs. The branch below is easy to spot, but the one above has an open split that remains connected on each end. It demonstrates the reason I was hearing so many cracking sounds, without seeing very many branches actually falling, when I was out for a walk after most of the snow had accumulated.

Hard as it is on tiring arms, to stand on the ground and hand-saw a branch high up in a tree, there comes the added complication of trying to get the severed branch down out of the tree, without breaking others, or causing any additional damage. It had me cursing for fear of doing more harm than good.

I succeeded in pruning multiple branches out of 4 of our prominent maples, before my arms gave out, and daylight faded.

I took one significant break from exerting myself on that project, during which, I rigged up a way to pull up a pine tree that had tipped over, using a come-along. It is the same tree that I wrote about in my post titled, Doubly Tipped, which we tried to support by tying to t-posts. That time, we just used muscle to push it back up to a partial tilt. The posts weren’t able to keep it upright, because the ground was too wet for them to stay put.

For now, we will let the tree rest against the pull of the cable, rigged to a nearby tree, with chains and straps. When the ground finally dries out, we’ll put the posts back in the ground and tie the tree off to them again.

Look at the dramatic difference of a few days in the life of this pine: (If you click on the last image, it will enlarge so that you can see the way we have it supported.)