Posts Tagged ‘widow makers’
Firewood Down
With a nod to Steve, who taught me that standing dead trees are simply verticle firewood storage, the latest high wind day we experienced brought two trees down across our trails on opposite ends of our property, and one of them was prime for cutting and splitting to burn.
The other tree was small enough that I was able to dispatch the limbs with our electric hand chainsaw pruner and stack the branches for removal to the north border of our property, where we are building a natural barrier along the fence line.
Wandering around in the woods in the vicinity of where I sawed logs from the larger tree, I started taking updated pictures of the multiple other trees that have succumbed to wind events. I think these have been shown in previous posts, so you may recognize several. None of them are across a trail, so I haven’t needed to do anything about them.
A couple of large poplars are hung up in adjacent trees and will present a significant challenge to bring down if we ever decide that needs to happen.
Unless a future big wind day succeeds in finishing the job, I intend to let the green growth of spring and summer cover up views of these trees. Out of sight, out of mind. Luckily, none of the “leaners” threaten to fall across a trail.
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Just Stuff
When on an expedition having nothing to do with society’s news of the day, one finds things of lesser significance can have a more dramatic impact than they otherwise might. With my mind protected from the gloom of current events during the last few months, I’ve found myself noticing more details about my immediate surroundings during daily walks.
The other day, I noticed some of our trees with an abundance of new shoots sprouting from the lower trunks. My intuition told me the trees were reacting to something, and when I figured out they were all ash trees, I knew what that was. The emerald ash borer is taking a toll on our region, and it seems our turn has come. I learned the new growth is called Epicormic Sprouts, revealing a tree’s effort to survive stress.
In addition, closer inspection revealed birds are chipping away at the outer bark to get at insects beneath. This gives the tree trunks an orange hue that makes them easy to spot from a distance. I was pointing it out to Cyndie yesterday, and we counted a handful of the largest affected ashes. I’ll be watching to see how long it takes them to die.
Meanwhile, we will continue to nurture new growth showing up in our oak, maple, elm, poplar, and spruce & pine tree populations.
This time of year, it is easier to spot the trees that have broken or tipped and are hung up in surrounding branches. The large poplar in this photo is a doozy. That break is probably 10ft(3m) or more up from the ground. I won’t be taking a chainsaw to this challenging widow-maker.
Several trees in the vicinity of that one broke off at a similar height. None of the others got hung up. Must have been an interesting gust of wind to cause that.
A couple of snow flurries ago, our driveway ended up looking rather bovine in appearance.
I gotta tell ya; it’s a lot easier to laugh or be mesmerized by the crazy things I see around me every day while on this expedition of avoiding that which would break my heart and spirit were I to give it a chance. I admit to feeling guilty about having the privilege that enables me to turn away while others must look straight at it all and will be receiving the brunt of abuses underway.
Even as I try to ignore it, there are blips of evidence that get through with hints of difficulties looming for the world.
I’m looking at our stressed forest and laughing at our second snow-starved winter in a row. I’m dreaming of a new shade sail for the horses and marveling over how the four Thoroughbreds are evolving as a herd of rescued former racers and broodmares. Just local stuff must be the focus right now for my fragile mind.
We will be voting with all our might at our upcoming Wisconsin election.
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Bad Thermocouple
We all have good days and bad days. Our day yesterday deserves to be called a good one. I try not to complain too much when I sleep soundly right up to a half-hour past when we usually feed the horses. Delilah let us sleep in. By the time I finished breakfast and made my way through the entire daily newspaper, it was almost 11 o’clock.
There are plenty of days when I would feel discouraged that outdoor projects didn’t get started until the middle of the day but given the luxury of freedom to take as much time as I want playing word games on my phone, finishing my poached eggs, and perusing all the articles in the newspaper is something I relish being able to do.
One key aspect of the day that made it so good was how much was achieved after the morning of leisure. Cyndie and I decided to get after the multiple “widow makers” hung up in our woods. Five of them, to be exact. Three of which were relatively small and easy to deal with. That left a couple that I wasn’t looking forward to and led me to don a helmet, just in case.
I was ultimately successful in all cases but the key reason all was good was a matter of luck that my being in an unsafe position right when the chain came off the bar didn’t lead to any negative consequences. The biggest and most challenging tree came down with a scary amount of cracking that had me jumping back three times, only to need to step in and continue the cut each time. When it finally crashed to the ground it was with a ferocious amount of energy that is really unnerving.
Once everything was on the ground, the clean up has become rather routine for us and we were able to process everything with rewarding efficiency. I was even able to cut three other trees that I’ve wanted to deal with for quite a while but never happen to have a chainsaw with me at the time. Yesterday, I had a saw.
As I was finishing up in the last spot, Cyndie caught up with me and said the guy who installed our horse waterer in the paddocks was coming to figure out why the heater wasn’t keeping the water from freezing like it used to.
This was a problem that plagued us throughout much of last winter and it was looking to be even worse this year based on the few overnight freezes we’ve experienced thus far. We’ve been asking for help for weeks but he hasn’t made it out, despite telling us he would.
Just having him show up was going to make for a good day but having him diagnose a specific problem of the thermocouple failure and his having a replacement with him and installing it without trouble seemed like a bonus.
Yesterday was one of those good days.
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Busted Tree
In my post on Sunday, I mentioned it was windy over the weekend. Yesterday morning, I found a small dead tree had tipped across one of our trails. Later in the afternoon, we discovered a larger tree had busted off on a different trail. High winds tend to bring down more than just small branches around our property.
Maybe the portion of the trunk that had been chewed up by some scavenger became the weak spot, as it snapped off right in the middle of that gaping wound. Regardless, the upper portion is caught in other trees and will need to be dealt with using the chainsaw.
There are currently four other trees in our woods, one smaller and two larger, that are similarly hung up. I have multiple opportunities to practice using the knowledge I gained watching professionals bring down much larger “widow-makers.”
Our “vertical firewood storage” is looking to be cut up and split, whether I want to do it right now or not.
Overnight Sunday we were visited by a little thunder and lightning along with what sounded like decent rainfall on the roof and skylight. Yesterday morning it was hard to tell any precipitation had fallen by the looks of things on the ground. Luckily, by evening the precipitation on the radar looked much more widespread with a potential of extended duration.
By dinnertime, the deck was actually wet from falling rain. Cyndie successfully got a rain cover on Mia to give her an edge in fending off a chill overnight. It would be just great if gentle rain like we were getting would last for several days.
That would give me more justification for putting off the chainsaw challenge I’m not fired up to tackle.
We have a plan in mind to do some much easier chainsawing behind Cyndie’s perennial garden where we found an eight-foot oak tree that is being smothered by junk trees. Actually, they are more like overgrown bushes than they are trees. In cutting down those nuisances we’ll open a lane behind the garden to continue the last distance for our perimeter trail along our property border.
The length from the west end of the north loop trail to behind the shop garage is so congested with wild growth that we have just taken to the driveway over the last ten years. Clearing that section will be a lot of work but I’ve wanted to create a path there for a long time, so it will be a very rewarding effort for me.
Not that bringing down busted widow-makers and cutting them up isn’t rewarding. Opening up a trail though, offers endless appreciation ever after with each successive stroll.
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Weed Control
We had two primary goals in mind when we plotted a strategy for what we would focus our efforts on yesterday. The first was something I hoped wouldn’t take a lot of time to accomplish. There were two tipped trees with upper branches hung up in surrounding trees. Using knowledge gained by watching the tree professionals who worked for us last spring bring down similar “widow-makers,” I readied our chainsaw and headed into the woods.
With my mind focused solely on the task at hand, I failed to take any pictures of the leaning trees or the keen aftermath of my success in bringing them down. The big poplar near the road took a lot more time than I anticipated. After five successive cuts ultimately eliminating the lower trunk that had been leaning at a 45° angle, the remaining upper portion of branches stood vertical and was still tangled in the branches of surrounding trees.
I needed to go back to the shop to get our pole chainsaw to finish the job. By the time we finished cutting trees, the day was more than half over.
The second goal was to get the hay field mowed, a job that I knew would take more hours than I really wanted to give to the task.
The growth wasn’t excessively tall but there were plenty of weeds maturing and we didn’t want them going to seed. I finally finished around 7:00 p.m. after almost 5 hours out on the tractor. At one point, feeling like it was taking too long, I tried running in a higher gear to speed up progress. The bouncing and jostling were a bit too much and the high gear made backing up hard to manage. All I could do was plod along at a steady pace in the lower gear and keep making passes until the entire field was finally cut.
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Cyndie took pictures as I headed toward the gate upon finishing. For a relatively small field, it sure is bigger than it seems.
The horses were relegated to the unmowed back pasture for the day. They are doing a fair job of grazing the good grass in that pasture but there are enough unwanted weeds in that field that it will need to be mowed soon as well.
In a day or two, they will be allowed back on the grass in the hay field. Then I will spend the better part of a day mowing the back pasture.
As much as I dread doing the mowing, the fields sure look great with all the weeds knocked down. For now, in our minds, mowing is our preferred method over chemical applications for reducing weeds that are toxic to horses. It may not be as effective, but mowing doesn’t leave a weed killer residue in our soil.
I can live with giving two afternoons of my precious time to bouncing along on the diesel tractor a couple of times a summer.
It’s easier than chainsawing widow-makers!
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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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Tending Growth
Without firm plans about what we would accomplish yesterday morning, I gassed up the big chainsaw and charged the battery on the hand trimmer chainsaw for a walk through the woods. We had a general goal of bringing down the most obvious trees that have tipped but then got hung up on surrounding limbs, but whatever caught our eyes was fair game.
It’s almost comical at times because Cyndie and I approach things very differently. She is given to focusing on multiple goals simultaneously while I find myself inclined to leave some things for later and head off for the next big tree as she lingers behind to take tending to the next level.
Well off the trail, we came upon two noteworthy finds. It is always surprising to find an isolated old fence post and rusty barbed wire in the middle of the woods.
A remarkably thick and fascinatingly curling vine stem was less surprising but equally unwelcome. We pulled it out to save with visions of conjuring some artistic use for it in the future.
When we emerged from the trees, it was time to tend to the ornamental tall grass up by the shop garage. The old growth gets cut back in early spring. This year we went with an extreme cut in preparation for a plan to try digging into the biggest bundle and dividing it for transplant.
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We don’t even have a plan for where we want to transplant them to next but we’ve got enough options that it will become a challenge to decide where not to add this gorgeous grass. The first challenge will be coping with the bed of rocks the main bundle has grown through.
Good thing I am a patient man.
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Relative Something 