Posts Tagged ‘willow tree’
Topped Off
In preparation for the pending installation of a shade sail in the paddock, yesterday, Cyndie and I cut off the last of the big branches on the dying willow tree. This is what it looked like before I started cutting:
Despite a strong, gusting wind and ridiculous footing due to the saturated heavy clay mud all around the tree, all three large limbs came down without a disaster occurring.
If I had needed to make a hasty exit due to an unexpected twisting or a limb snapping where I didn’t intend, there is a good chance I would have needed to leave a boot behind, suctioned in the muck, to pull my foot out and dive clear. Thankfully, no evasive action was required.
I am very grateful that Cyndie was able to act as a spotter and offer smart advice to cut portions at a time but not make more cuts than necessary. She also carried more than her share of heavy loads in the clean-up work after the main cutting was done.
We made good use of all three of our Stihl chainsaw tools to complete this exercise. The little hand pruner is priceless for cutting all the small branches off the main trunks. I needed to use the big saw to cut the large limbs into pieces we could carry. It only required three trips with the trailer behind the ATV to haul away all the debris and leave the paddock and surrounding area looking better than it did before we started.
The result was more dramatic than I anticipated it would be. Removing all that height of branches towering over the small paddock created a startling difference in the ambiance of the entire area. My first impression is that I don’t like the change. However, it won’t be long until the next phase will happen in the form of the shade sail, and I think that will go a long way toward compensating for the loss of the tall willow tree branches.
We are expecting delivery of the canopy by the end of today and the lumber is due to be delivered on Thursday. I am meeting with a local contractor on Wednesday afternoon to negotiate his support to rent a post-hole auger and then supervise or assist as needed in getting the frame erected. I saw his company advertised on the Nextdoor app, offering professional help to lay people trying to accomplish DIY projects that stretch just a little beyond their abilities. It seemed like a perfect fit for this endeavor. It sounded like he felt the same way in our initial email exchanges.
By the end of this week, we should have a good idea of when the groundbreaking will occur. I can’t imagine the horses have any clue about what’s in store.
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Willow Buds
The maple sap should be flowing this weekend with our overnight temps dropping below freezing and daytime rising above. Yesterday, we noticed the big willow tree was looking rather anxious to be getting on with spring.
It inspired me to take a closer look at the buds getting ready to pop.
I sure hope the tree knows what it’s doing. Growing things don’t tend to waste time when the hours of sun increase in spring, and many of our trees look like they want to burst forth with leaves.
It breaks my heart when the weather messes with their timing and a hard freeze ends up killing new buds.
Reminds me what it’s like to have tariffs mess with my investment portfolio.
Instead of paying attention to that, because if I think about the state of things beyond the borders of our property it makes me cry, Cyndie brought out her bird-identifying app and we let her phone listen to all the birdsongs during our morning walk.
Of course, the song that was most prominent and wonderfully dramatic stopped as soon as she pulled out her phone. All the regulars were in full form but there were others of which I wasn’t aware and we couldn’t officially confirm.
Here’s a list of all the birds identified:
American Robin
Northern Cardinal
Blue Jay
American Crow
Red-winged Blackbird
Northern Flicker
Song Sparrow
Brown-headed Cowbird
Dark-eyed Junco
(later in the day… Red-Tailed Hawk)
I’d like to get a look at that Cowbird if it was truly present. We saw very few of these feathered friends listed while walking Asher. Without the use of an app for identification, it would all simply be the background soundtrack to our great outdoors.
Since we hadn’t made it to the barn yet, no pigeons were detected during the morning stroll but they are still around. Just not nesting in the eaves of the barn anymore.
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Slow Death
In my lifetime, I’ve watched a lot of trees die a slow death. The willow in our small paddock was a beautiful tree when we moved here. When we fenced it in, we knew the risk we were taking and tried to protect the bark with a variety of barriers to prevent horses from chewing on it. That battle was not going to stave off the inevitable because the combination of heavy hoof traffic and standing urine puddles in that very wet soil was killing it from the ground up.
2013
When it became obvious the tree was dying, we removed the protection from the trunk and let the horses have at it. For two growing seasons, I have been shocked by how much green growth was still sprouting amid the tangle of dead branches. Today, the lean is obvious, and I’m not sure the tree will be standing long enough to find out if any new leaves will show up at all this year.
The horses have seemed to enjoy chewing away at the base of their favorite shade spot.
At this point, it hardly offers much shade at all, but they still frequently hang out beneath it, maybe out of habit.
Soon I will have to cut it up and haul the debris away and the horses will have nothing to stand under except for the overhang of the barn. This has me dreaming again of a sail shade for them. I think that would be pretty slick.
I also think it would be pretty expensive to pull off. I have my doubts about such a feature working in our climate year-round and wonder how long a life expectancy a sail would have under relentless UV rays, occasional high winds, and periods of heavy snow. However, in the simple terms of shade on a sunny day, I think it would be a really neat solution.
Maybe we should do a feasibility study on the idea. If it ends up not being a sensible way to provide shade for the horses, there are other possibilities we could consider. Coming up with something that will take the abuse that horses can dish out tends to complicate the search, but by looking for ways other horse folks have solved the issue, I’m sure we could find a reasonably affordable method that beats a dying willow tree.
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Eaten Tree
There was a time when the willow tree was happy and healthy inside the space that we fenced off for our small paddock. Knowing full well the threat livestock pose to trees within their confines, we tried several versions of barriers intended to keep the horses from chewing the bark. It was fine with us that they munched the hanging branches. It gave the tree a look of being well-trimmed at all times.
After the first few attempts to protect the tree trunk proved insufficient –read: the horses just chewed up whatever we tried using– I chose to wrap the tree with hardware cloth. In time, even that protection broke down under the constant rubbing and biting from the horses, but it no longer appeared to matter by then. The tree was beginning to fail from the compression of the soil around the roots and we suspect, the heavy dose of horse urine that stagnated there as well.
Even when provided two years free of horses in that paddock, the gorgeous willow tree continued to show evidence of an ongoing downward spiral. Based on that, when we found out that new horses would be coming to live with us, we decided we would no longer do anything toward protecting the trunk of the tree.
This is what unobstructed access to the trunk of the tree looks like after two years:
I’m a little surprised by how interested the horses are in the roots. They’ve almost chewed more roots than bark at this point. At the very top of the image, you can see the horses also like to reach up to chew well above their shoulder height. Since we’ve given up on the tree, I see the chewing of tree bark as taking away some of the pressure on the boards and fencing around the overhang.
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Changes Underway
There is no denying the trend that is underway. Our trees are beginning to reveal what their true autumn colors will be as the change inches toward its peak.
Will it be a week or several? Time will tell. We often get hit with strong winds just when the colors are about to be their best, which knocks much of the glory to the ground sooner than we want. Yesterday’s wind wasn’t as dramatic as I feared. Brought down more twigs and sticks than leaves, probably because not many leaves have changed yet.
I walked past the willow tree in the paddock and realized that I’d only seen a horse eating a branch one time yet the bottom of the branches end perfectly at the height they can reach. They are keeping it trimmed. Look at the willow tree in the background to see the difference of one beyond their access.
We gave up trying to protect the one in the paddock and didn’t expect to see any new leaves on the branches this summer so it has already outlived our expectations. The horses chew on the bark and roots in our presence, but I guess they wait until we aren’t around to prune the growing branches.
I think they will miss it when the tree no longer provides much in the way of shade. We have been trying to nurse along some new shade trees we transplanted just beyond the paddock fence but they won’t be providing much shade until a decade from now. I mean, if they even survive this first-year shock of having been moved.
We’ll find out next summer whether any of them might have a future of someday adding colors to our glorious autumn seasons.
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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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New Ramp
Our chickens have been politely accepting the replacement ramp Cyndie fashioned out of some spare wire shelving, after her incidental demolition of my original ramp, when she killed the possum multiple times with a shovel back in February. But, the replacement was intended to be temporary, so I have been plotting “Ramp 2.0” for some time.
I’m not sure it will be shovel proof, but I did try to beef it up a little bit. The chickens took a liking to pulling out the sticks in my first version, so I increased the weave to hopefully slow that process.
Initially, I tried grinding notches in the cross braces, hoping to “key” the branches to seat tightly together. It ended up being a wasted effort, as my technique was rather imprecise and the frame branches kept torquing and twisting out of the sweet spots as I wove sticks through.
Since I increased the weave, adding two smaller vertical branches, it became critical that I find sticks that could really flex. The solution came to me after winter storms brought down a massive number of branches from our willow tree this year.
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On a return trip to the tree for more material, I noticed there were some new branches sprouting from the trunk that were destined to be pruned, so I included those, as well. It was very helpful to have the “live” branches, because the closer I got to finishing, the less space there was to angle the branches into the tight bend required.
Gives it a little color.
Since the notched frame branches had shifted out of position, I decided to add some screws to lock things in place after the weave was complete. It is definitely more robust than the first ramp I built.
With that, the new ramp was ready to be mounted on the coop for chickens to test.
I am interested in finding out if they will try to disassemble this one as much as they did the first ramp. Something about little sticks that seemed to just call to the chickens. I don’t think they could help themselves. It was irresistible.
Maybe they won’t like willow branches and will just leave it alone. I have my doubts about that wishful thinking. Then what it will come down to is, whether my two additional vertical branches (the warp) will be enough to discourage the chickens from trying to pull (the weft) branches out.
Worst case, I need to collect more willow branches. Luckily, that tree seems to offer up an unending supply.
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