Yesterday, I’d done the south lawns, including along the fence line and behind the “spare” house (more as a space to turn around with the mower, than to cut anything, since there’s barely any grass there).

Today, I set aside hoses, picked up branches, and so on, before I finished mowing the rest of the lawn.

Later, I went back behind the other house to see if I could get down some more of the dead branches.  A lot of it involved simply reaching up with the extended pruning saw, which has a hook at the point, grabbing onto an attached dead branch, or dangling broken branch, and yanking until it fell to the ground.

I even remembered to take a picture of how it looks, after my daughters did such a great job raking up under there.

Which is when I found this.

The branch is so big, I actually missed it at first, thinking it was just another part of a tree.  Nope.  A big ole branch broke, some time after I’d mowed here yesterday, and was hung up in the other trees.

I couldn’t even tell which tree it came from.

In the picture, you can just see the power line that goes from the other house, to the pump shack (which isn’t hooked up now, thank God!).  It wasn’t on the power line, but the branch that it was stuck on, is just above the power line.

Once again, I used the extended pruning saw to grab and yank it down, though I did have to cut down a branch from the tree outside the yard that was hanging over the fence, and in the way.

Finding stuff like this is why I’m on such a drive to get the dead and dying branches down, as much as possible.  We’ve got entire trees that are ready to come down, almost on their own.  One is right in this area, in fact; I cut away some of the lower branches that I kept getting hung up on, and the entire tree was shaking and making cracking noises at the base.  I could probably push it right over, if it wouldn’t fall directly on that power line I mentioned earlier.

After this, I did some other clean up in the yard, but I will post about it later.  After I shower.  I keep finding little bits of dead tree stuck in my hair!

The Re-Farmer