Posts Tagged ‘tree trimming’
Branch Removal
The weather was pleasant yesterday and enough snow had melted at the top of the driveway that I was able to cut up the branches of the big limb that came down in the last storm. That meant I needed to fire up the chainsaw that hasn’t seen any action in months. It was a little reluctant to start which involved enough pulling that I required a break to catch my breath but the second effort was the charm.
I cut up the fallen limb to three different levels: logs to split for firewood, branch trunks 4″ or less saved for the chipper, and branch tops to pile along our north property border. I trimmed the broken stump back to the main trunk of the tree and held it up for Cyndie like it was a trophy.
Looking at the tree after I was done, the overall shape seems pretty healthy. It’s as if this limb deserved to be removed for the overall benefit of the tree. That’s the way I’m going to frame it from now on, anyway.
Today, Cyndie departs to Puerto Rico for a week with our daughter to celebrate a milestone birthday this year for Carlos. I will go on a John diet for a week. The meals I prepare for myself are a lot simpler than the feasts Cyndie serves.
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Lake Trees
Because we can, we are up at the lake in the middle of the week to witness some tree trimming and/or removal by professionals planned for today. We came up yesterday afternoon with Cyndie’s mom and brought Delilah with us so we only needed to find someone to feed the horses while we are away.
The water level of the lake is much lower than usual, clearly reflecting how dry we have it at home 125 miles to the south. It’s no less gorgeous, thank goodness.
We quickly found evidence that some trees have already been removed around the Wildwood property.
This hollow beast was close to the area Cyndie and I created a small labyrinth in the woods on the edge of the driveway. Whatever machine they used during the job tracked over a portion of the rustic path we had tried to create. It is likely they never noticed because the ground is blanketed with leaves and the circuitous route was entirely hidden.
We had barely placed enough rocks to define the pathway and some of those appear to have rolled out of position so reclaiming the original circles of travel out from under the cover of leaves was an exercise in approximation.
Close enough for now.
I just hope there are no more trees in that section of woods they need to deal with. Cyndie said they took down some trees which they were able to cut from the ground and today we expect them to show up with a bucket truck. There is one tree in particular over our driveway between several cabins that needs to go.
I’m looking forward to watching the process as if it were a spectator sporting event. It will be easier to enjoy this show than when I watch crews work on our property at home because up here, I won’t be responsible for cleaning up everything they cut down.
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Danger Zone
Green growth is bursting at breakneck speed everywhere we turn this time of year. As much as I dream of letting nature have its way to grow unhindered, experience reveals a number of ways intervention offers room for improvement. Pruning becomes a responsibility, really, to offset the alternative look of neglect.
After enlisting the professional help of tree trimmers to prune and fell trees on our 20 acres, I have an endless amount of clean-up to do in their wake. Historically, I have failed to keep up with the felled lumber that hired help has scattered around our forest floor so I am striving to change that this time.
My effort started with the large willow tree that was first on the list of trees needing attention this spring and which got pruned to a much greater degree than I expected.
Yesterday, I worked to finish cutting up and splitting the last of the large branches scattered beneath the tree after the pruners were finished. The closer I got to completing the effort of clearing the tangle of branches and limbs laying around the trunk of the tree, the more obvious it became that I was working in a danger zone of poison ivy.
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The shiny leaves of three with a tinge of redness in the early period of sprouting were everywhere beneath this willow. Everything that I picked up had a high probability of having been in contact with the dreaded rash-inducing plants but I was knee-deep and hours long into the project so I decided to just keep going.
With extra consciousness to quit reaching my gloved hands up to my face, I forged ahead cutting, splitting, and stacking limbs in the woodshed for drying.
It felt a little insane to be plodding back and forth in growth that was filled with so much poison ivy but I decided it was a risk I needed to face to complete the bigger task at hand. It feels great to have the ground around the tree entirely picked up after the pruning. Now I only have twenty or thirty others left deserving similar treatment.
Thankfully, there aren’t any others surrounded by as much poison ivy as this willow.
At the end of my many outdoor projects, I carefully got out of my clothes and piled them in the basement to be laundered and then hit the shower with special oil-busting soap that I lathered and lathered in hopes of surviving the danger with minimal reaction.
I can hope that I wasn’t breathing aerosolized particles of the oil during the tree branch cutting and clearing efforts. My body doesn’t have a good history of inhaling the irritating essence of poison ivy.
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More Surprises
A full day in the woods directing the work of the tree cutters on Friday turned up a couple of unexpected flower surprises for me.
The first was when I came upon these cute little wildflower bunches beneath my favorite hunk of a tree.
No tree trimming of that beast was done that day as our attentions were elsewhere. I just happened to be waiting a safe distance away from where a large leaning tree was being professionally dispatched to the ground when I spotted the flowery accents.
In a somewhat similar situation, only, different, I found this single flowering trillium just after a tree that had been hiding it from view was cut down.
That one is definitely NOT one that we transplanted from the lake place. Finding this is encouraging for our goal of establishing a greater presence of trillium in our woods. If they are showing up naturally, that definitely bodes well.
That’s all I got. Short and sweet this morning because I am off to drive for an hour to meet friends for a morning bike ride. Further tree work and lawn mowing will need to wait for another day. I’ve been granted a day off to pedal!
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Trees Trimmed
It was a lucky Friday the 13th for us yesterday. The professional tree trimmers we contracted with finally arrived to spend a day felling and trimming multiple large trees. When the job was quoted, it was easier to see the many trees in our woods that had tipped and become hung up on surrounding branches. Now there is just enough greenery beginning to sprout that the views are a little more obscured.
When the two-man crew arrived, the horses were highly curious about the mysterious-looking machinery that rolled over the first hill of our driveway.
They just as quickly came to accept the racket made by dueling chainsaws as no big thing, even though the bucket mechanism the guys were using looked a little creepy.
That big willow looks so much less neglected today. That’s one tree species that prodigiously sprouts random new branches every which way along the full length of its trunk.
Two of the largest and oldest maple trees that have been slowly dying received a different bit of serious pruning as we strive to prolong the glory of their stature on our landscape.
It’s getting to the point there isn’t much left of them. One large limb broke loose last year and landed on the equally large limb just beneath it. I’ve been yearning to take that extra weight off the lower branch but the job was beyond my capacity. Work like this, since there were plenty of other tree issues that deserved attention as well, made it easy to justify bringing in the professionals.
One of the other things we focused on was bringing to the ground any trees that had tipped but didn’t make it all the way down. Nicknamed “widow makers,” they can be tricky to deal with since the entanglement above can lead to unexpected movements of the tree being cut. I was more than happy to leave the stress of that challenge for someone other than me.
As long as they were here, I gave them full permission to cut down any tree that had been marked with red by our DNR Forester who paid a visit several years ago. There were so many marked trees that I haven’t been able to put a dent in the number. Watching how much work it took for a professional to cut them all in one particular section helped me to justify why I haven’t cut them all myself.
Also, it leaves a monumental amount of work to ultimately clean up off the ground, which I chose not to pay them to do. We have an endless supply of chip-able sized trees littering the forest floor now.
There is work enough to keep me busy in the lumberjack role full time. Too bad that I am also the lawn groundskeeper, fence mender, equine fecal relocation specialist, dog walker, home maintenance amateur, hay bale hauler, horse feeder, labyrinth tender, and Stihl power trimmer user extraordinaire.
I only get to do the lumberjack work in my spare time.
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Small Projects
The weekend just passed consisted of many small tasks chipped off the ol’ to-do list, primarily addressing the first-impression appearance of the place. After getting the grass mowed and the landscape pond fixed my attention shifted to whatever miscellaneous project caught my eye, particularly if they had been staring me in the face for more than a year.
I finally got up on the roof to address the wind vane that came apart so long ago I’ve forgotten when. I ended up removing the base entirely to see if repairs on the ground are possible. I may, or may not, put it back up someday.
The kids stopped by on Saturday and Julian helped me quickly dispatch a dead pine tree located right in front of the approach to the house garage doors. Yesterday, I pulled out the chainsaw again and removed dead limbs from the next tree over, some version of a flowering decorative. I think that one is a form of lilac, but seems to have climbed to heights that exceed my perceptions of lilac.
While the chainsaw was out, I hoofed my way down to the woods behind the labyrinth to cut up a dead tree that fell across one of our small side trails. At the labyrinth, I removed the stakes that secured the transplanted maple now that it seems to have established itself. There, I discovered the deer have been feasting on the hostas by the peace pole.
I hope they had a very peaceful meal there while the angel’s back was turned.
The driveway got some attention in the form of lime screenings packed into a low dip that was becoming quite a bump in the road. The last time a UPS truck delivered a package, I heard everything bounce in his truck when passing over that spot a little too quickly.
Julian and I started removing anything attached to the side of the house in preparation for a resealing of the logs that will hopefully happen sooner than later. We have enlisted the services of professionals and they have teased us that we are next in line when they finish the current customer.
That’s another one of those weather-dependent projects that end up being hard to plan start and finish dates.
That brings to mind the hay fields. Things are growing so fast right now that our fields look ripe for the mowing. I don’t know what the farmer who is renting our fields this summer is planning, but I hope he is able to get enough dry days in a row to be successful this year.
The only thing I didn’t get to before time ran out last night was in fulfilling Cyndie’s wish to get the hammocks up.
That’s a good task to look forward to for starting my next spurt of knocking off small projects, whenever that moment comes.
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Gettin’ Green
With a little rearranging in the garage, I moved the ATV and snowplow to the back and brought the lawn tractor to the front. It’s a definitive sign of the change of season. I also got the back yard mowed, which brought out a whole lot of green in our landscape.
Probably in large part, because it chewed up the leaves from last fall that were still covering the bulk of the back hill, because we never got around to raking them before the snow arrived.
From there, we headed down to the labyrinth, where Cyndie pulled weeds and I reassembled the fallen blocks around our compost and wood chip locations.
Now, we need to replenish the wood chips, and there are plenty of branches waiting to be chipped. A short distance to the right from the view in that photo, there was a collection of branches from two years ago, when we hired professionals to trim dead wood from our trees.
It was a big reward to finally start pulling the debris out, because every time I have passed those trees since the day it was cut, I’ve wanted to have the job done.
I probably got through about half of what needs to be pulled out and stacked for processing, but it’s a good start.
I look forward to transforming that pile of branches into a filled wood chip station, which Cyndie can then use to dress up the landscape around her labyrinth plants.
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Wild Life
Lately, the night views at the coop have been dominated by the masked bandits. Luckily, despite their regular visits, there isn’t anything left out overnight to reward them.
Doesn’t prevent them from checking, just in case.
The only other (not-so) wild life we captured shots of recently was a neighbor’s cat. It sat for over ten minutes with its body facing the camera, but the head was always twisted side to side or around backwards. I don’t know why it didn’t just turn around.
I think maybe it was trying to see where that rabbit went that had been filling our memory card with pictures the previous week. That critter was pouncing back and forth across the view all night long.
The other wildness we have been enjoying was in the sky. Cyndie snapped this panorama as a thundering shower loomed large over the ranch.
I had just finished mowing and was putting the tractor in the garage when the first giant drops started slapping the ground.
It was a wild day of chores yesterday, after I squeaked in a short bike ride to start my exhausting day. Our grove of trees by the road was expanding to obscure the view of traffic coming down the hill, so I hauled out the pole chainsaw and did some highway crew style pruning.
No mercy.
Being clever, I put the battery charger on the truck before heading out on my bike ride earlier, thinking I might want to load the cuttings into the pickup so I wouldn’t have to work on chipping them near traffic.
There is a phantom load draining the battery that we haven’t been able to identify. I have finally heeded advice from a smart thinking friend and purchased a switch to protect the battery. After all the branches were loaded in the back, I parked the truck at the shop to install the device while the battery had some life to it.
I bought a unit that will automatically switch out the battery when it senses the voltage drop to a certain point. To reconnect, we simply press the brake pedal or toggle the headlights and the switch re-engages the battery to start the truck. This way, we don’t have to pop the hood and open or close the switch every time we use the truck.
We never know how long an interval it will be between uses, and both Cyndie and I are prone to forgetting just this kind of occasional detail.
With the installation complete, I moved on to the lawn tractor to finish the yard that I started Thursday afternoon, before that round of all-night thunderstorms. On my bike ride in the morning, I saw a lot of farm fields with brand new lakes in them. Our rain gauge indicated over 4-inches had fallen overnight.
Low on gas, and running out of time before the next thunderstorm, I wildly hustled to the arena to mow that, too.
By the time Cyndie and I called it a day, the clock had reached 7:30 p.m.
Another wild day in our wild life.
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Next Phase
Picking up where the tree trimmers left off, I pulled the tractor out of the garage yesterday and we started the process of turning the piles of branches into wood chips. With the temperatures pushing into warmth much more typical for May or June, the timing was perfect for having fresh ground cover over the now muddy path leading down toward the barn from the driveway.
I quickly relearned how much physical effort is involved in the process of repeatedly feeding the chipping monster. The variety of branches that came out of our trees made for a constant struggle to detangle, reorient, and guide into the chute.
The smallest ends of branches will catch and get hung up on the corners, which interrupts flow, and the big limbs tend to bounce and torque when first struck by the powerful spinning blades. My body and hands frequently get smacked by the kick-back of the bigger branches.
After a prolonged session of working to make a pile of branches disappear into a wonderful mound of precious wood chips, I feel like I’ve been a few rounds in a boxing match.
Cyndie helped to bring branches from farther and farther, and worked to cut junctions that “Y” off too wide to fit the bottom of the narrowing chute. We parked the tractor on the solid pavement of the driveway to be out of the mud that is quickly becoming the prevailing footing during this unbelievable February melt down.
We took a little break for lunch and then when I came out for a few more rounds of battle, it was T-shirt weather. It is just plain sad to be living through the end of cold and snowy winters like the ones I enjoyed as a kid. I fear for the precious trees I have been focused on caring for these last few days, as they react to the warmth and prepare to sprout new buds.
If they sprout leaves too early, they risk an ugly death from freezing when a hint of real winter returns for a last gasp reminder of cold that usually happens this time of year.
When I turned the key to restart the tractor, nothing happened. Well, not nothing. The indicator lights lit up, but there was no hint of sound from the starter. I have experienced this before. It was how I was first introduced to this tractor. No matter what I did, I could not get it to start.
That first time, I ended up needing to have a service person come out. He accidentally figured out the safety interlock of the PTO lever wasn’t getting met. After chasing a different possibility for a time, I came around to the same conclusion. It was the PTO lever again.
I got the engine started, repositioned the tractor to a new spot and was ready to go. I picked a big old dead oak branch to start and quickly busted the shear pin of the chipper.
I took the hint and called it a day for chipping.
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Tree Artistry
These guys are good. I got worn out just watching them work.
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The weather turned out to be pretty good for the work we had planned. Morning started out sunny enough to feel energized, but the air temperature remained cold enough that the lift unit was able to be navigated to more trees than I expected. The trimmer in the bucket moved around like the apparatus was an extension of his own body.
His chainsaw was on and off without effort and he held it with one hand as he cut, while his other hand supported the branches being removed, to guide them to the ground.
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Trees out of reach of the lift were simultaneously being rope-climbed in order to cut down dead limbs that have been looming threateningly over our trail for far too long. It is quite something to glance up and find a yellow jacketed person so high up in our big old trees.
There were some startlingly large chunks of tree plummeting from these heights. It was instantly rewarding to see the pieces safely on the ground after enduring the risk of dead limbs overhead for a few years.
Once they get up within reach of these branches, the work moves along swiftly as they study the task and make their cuts with great skill.
Between the strenuous sessions rope climbing the tallest trees, they did some pole-saw cutting and limb climbing of our smaller trees to thin out overcrowded growth, removing co-leaders and opening space for wind to move through easier. This will help the trees withstand wind storms and give them a healthy shape for years to come.
Some of the trees look like they just got a serious haircut, but I’m thrilled it’s being done to give them a few years to grow into a new, healthy look.
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Relative Something 