The winds are still blowing like crazy right now. I headed outside to check on things. I hoped to do a bit on that garden bed, but the soil is still just too wet to sift.
The plastic on the box frame was starting to blow loose and I was trying to find ways to fix it when I heard a cracking noise.
The dead tree by the back of the garage was blown over, right on top of the outhouse!
Thank God the wind wasn’t blowing the other way, or it would have landed on the garage!
Looking at the base, there’s basically no roots left! I don’t know how long this tree has been dead. Just that it was already dead when we moved here. My guess is, many years of water pooling behind the garage and around to the outhouse simply rotted away the roots until there was next to nothing to hold it in the ground. At least, not with winds like we’re having right now!
My younger daughter came out to see what the noise was and we talked about it for a bit. There’s nothing we can do about the tree right now. Once things have dried up enough, we can tie a rope around the trunk and pull it off with the truck. Waiting for the ground to dry is going to be important, since we’ll otherwise just be spinning tires in the mud and tearing up the yard.
Dragging it off will totally demolish the outhouse.
Well, so much for our “second bathroom”. We won’t need to patch up that roof and give the outside a paint job anymore, though the inside looks real nice. 😄
We still plan to build an outdoor bathroom with a composting toilet, rather than a pit, and it was going to go in a higher area. An area we are now having to walk through standing water to get to. The spot I was thinking would be good to build in is basically in an open area leading into the spruce grove, near where the compost pile is right now. It is very wet, but the plan had been to build up a pad of packed gravel, first, so it would be build on a raised and level foundation that drains real well. I didn’t realize at the time I was considering this, just how much that would be necessary!
But first, we need to cut down the dead trees, as some of them need to be felled into where the outdoor bathroom will eventually be.
Now I’m wondering if we’ll be losing any more trees today!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 