Fall Yard Work

[kevin_standlee]

Several days of below-freezing overnight temperatures have led to most of the trees on the property to shed their foliage as a rapid rate. In the mornings, I can step outside on the porch and watch leaves (and small branches) fall. Enough fell off the large bush by the front door that I could get in to it after lunch and prune off most of the branches. Every year, I keep thinking that I've killed it as it sits there shorn of nearly everything but the main stem, and every spring it shoots back up again and grows at an amazing rate. Now I need to start raking up all of the fallen debris.

I attended the Fire Board meeting last night. It was like old times; I was the only "civilian" (i.e. neither a director nor an employee of the district) there after an attorney for a firm selling its services to the district gave his presentation and left. A couple of directors asked where I've been, and I told them that I did them a favor last month by not showing up with the awful cold from the Ireland-Iceland trip. It's a form of enlightened selfishness. I did not want to infect the people who might be called upon to provide emergency services to my house with my cold.

Comments

[scott_sanford]

Years ago I did the same thing several times to a fence-eating tree at the back of my mother's yard; I didn't know about coppicing back then, only that it kept regrowing. (We'd have let it be if it had not been right next to a fence we wanted to keep.) You may be trimming that bush for a while.

[kevin_standlee]

Ah, thanks for the reference. I don't mind it getting all bushy in the summer; it provides a little bit of shade on the house, and we definitely need it then. We cut it back because it gets high enough to start menacing the power and telephone feeds to the house, and when the winds get high, I start getting nervous about the tree knocking the lines down.