kevin_standlee | She's a Lumberjack, but I'm Okay

We had a non-rainy day today, and I was able to free up enough of my afternoon that Lisa and I could get out and cut trees and clear brush.

Some of you may recall that last winter a tree dropped a bunch of branches on the main path across the property. That tree still has some unhappy-looking branches, and one in particular was a cause for concern, so Lisa climbed into the tree with the bow saw to tackle it. It was clearly under a lot of strain, for she had not cut very far into it when it gave forth a mighty crack and swung down. It got stuck in the other branches around it, and it took a fair bit of cutting of the brushy bits to get it freed up sufficiently to get it to the ground.

Lisa got out the electric chainsaw and used it to trim the brushy parts and reduce the tree branch to firewood-sized pieces. It wasn't a huge amount of wood -- only one cart-load -- but every bit helps.

That took less time than we thought it would, so we decided to work on the apple tree. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a "before" photo of the old apple tree, which badly needed a haircut. We don't like apples that much anyway, and therefore all we have is an overgrown apple tree with a mush of rotten apples surrounding it.

Lisa started cutting away much of the vertical growth, with the idea of substantially trimming back the apple tree. I pulled branches as she cut them away. After a while, she climbed into the tree to start cutting the bits she couldn't reach from ground level.

Some of the branches are fairly decent sized, and we'll later cut them into firewood, but most are just long (up to four or five meters) thin branches with lots of little branches off of them. As she cut the branches, I would drag them away. However, one time I wasn't quite nimble enough: a branch fell away differently than the way Lisa expected, and it clouted me on the head while I had my back turned dragging away previous cuts. It wasn't a huge branch, and it did no harm, but it was startling. Lisa points out that the books are balanced, because while I was pulling down one of the branches, it turned funny and nearly knocked her out of the tree.

There is a surprising amount of brushy wood in that tree, and after a hour or two, Lisa gave up for the day. We're about one-third finished with the apple tree. Unfortunately, we have a whole bunch of apple tree branches that are too big for the hand-cart, so if we want to move them to the "coal seam," we're going to have to cut them down to size.

Speaking of the cart, I hauled four or five cart-loads of smaller branches, including some of those left over from bout with the Tree of Doom that dropped on the roof of the old house, to the "coal seam" after taking the cart-load of future firewood to the wood shed.

It's good to get these branches cut, but hauling the wood is a hassle. We may need to look into renting a wood chipper sometime in order to reduce these many piles of wood debris to more manageable form.