This morning we had some very welcome rain.  We are also supposed to hit above 30C today, with chances of thunderstorms, so I decided to do a check around the yard and see if any more branches had come down, etc.

There were a few small branches, but as I went around the other house (I think I should call it the storage house, though we aren’t storing anything in there ourselves), I found a surprise.

Remember this tree?

The dead one on the right of the picture, with the crows nest in it?

This is what it looked like today.

Yeah, the crows nest is now almost hidden by greenery.

The trunk to the right is part of the tree, too, and is dead, but the trunk with the nest had suddenly sprouted leaves.

Just a few days ago, there was NO sign of life in that trunk.  Not even buds.  The only living thing growing on that trunk was moss and lichen.

Many of the branches are still dead or mostly dead, but fresh leaves have burst out all over the place.

The dead trunk had a large branch leaning on the disconnected power line running to the storage house, while the rest of it leans above it, holding up a broken, though still living, branch from another tree.

So I decided to take some of that down.

After taking down the branch on the disconnected power line with the extended pruning saw, I made the initial cut on the dead trunk higher up, where it was most vertical, so that I could guide the fall straight down, rather than have it falling sideways onto the power line.  Granted, the power line is only held up by a tree outside the yard, but I still didn’t want anything landing on it, as much as I can avoid it.  Then I cut the trunk again, lower down in a spot I could access with the bow saw.

As I was cleaning up after all this, I found another surprise, by the branch that had come down earlier in the month.

I had gone over this area with the weed trimmer as much as I could, and it was basically all just grass.  I guess clearing it as much as I did was enough to spur the growth of some hidden horseradish!

I had no idea horseradish had ever been planted here!

When we first moved to the city we were living in before coming back here, we used to hike in the river valley trails a lot.  The first spring we explored the trails, I was seeing horseradish growing wild, all over the place.  It was like a weed!  I’ve never seen anything like it, anywhere else.  I like that it is such a resilient plant.

With big, healthy horseradish growing in other areas of the yard, I will not be making any effort to keep these when I come back with the weed trimmer, but it was still cool to find them.

The Re-Farmer