My original plan for this afternoon was to continue mowing, but I decided it was going to get too hot to be walking back and for for hours in the sun.

So I decided cutting back trees for hours was somehow better. 😁

Oh, to be fair, pruning the trees did allow me to spend more time in the shade than if I were mowing.

Except when I was hauling branches to the chipping pile.

Ah, well. The job needed to be done! It did eventually get too hot, though. We were supposed to reach our high of 25C/77F at 6pm. Instead we hit it by 2pm. As I write this, we’re at a humidex of 27C/81F. Definitely not good for me to be outside doing manual labour.

I didn’t even think to take “before” pictures, as I’ve taken so many pictures of the area for other reasons. This is what the area in front of the outhouse looks like now.

The arrows point to where two large branches were cut away. They were in the path of that big, dead spruce tree, when it gets cut down. There is now a clear gap for the spruce to fall. Removing them did take out some of the shade, but this is an elm. It’ll sent up new branches in no time, and they will grow in dense and bushy, so there will be share here again, soon enough.

These are the cut down pieces of the second branch I cut away from that tree. Both of them were about the same size, so there was about twice what you see in the photos that got broken down before they were manageable for hauling away. There were also quite a few dead branches that got cleared out, too.

There is another elm nearby that has many dead branches on it, but it won’t be cleaned up just yet. The way it’s leaning, the pieces might fall on the garlic and yellow pear tomato beds. It can wait until those beds have been harvested.

Once everything was hauled away and cleaned up, I was quite ready to go inside, but decided to clear some of the branches overhanging the sunchokes and asparagus beds. Then a few more… and a few more…

I did finally stop, though there are still more branches to take down. It was just getting too hot, and I can’t handle heat like I could in my younger days! I did move the gate and some old branches that were too big for our chipper to go around the other side of the chain link fence and clear the tall grass away, too.

When the tree guys come with their industrial chipper, they’ll have more than just rotting branches that have been sitting for years to chip. 😊

Time to cool down inside for a little while!

The Re-Farmer