Such a lovely day today!

We had a gentle rainfall this morning, and when it cleared up, it stayed nice and cool.

Perfect weather for some manual labour!

So after a run into town this morning for a medical appointment for my husband, I spend the afternoon working on the next section of the west side of the maple grove.

Photo heavy post, ahead! :-D

Here are some before and after pictures, starting from the south side.  I took this from where I last finished off. (click on the images to see larger versions)

I decided to take out the little caraganas, since there are two large ones in the areas I’d cleaned up before.

I didn’t use the weed trimmer first, as I had last time, since it’s corded and there had been rain.  I suppose the electrical cords likely would have been fine, but trimming damp greenery just makes a mess that needs to be scraped off the trimmer guard, frequently.  That, and I didn’t mind leaving the flowers to bloom longer, though dragging trees or pushing a wheel barrow through them sort of negated that particular thought! :-D

In the background, you can see the dry, small-wood pile that we use for the fire pit.  Almost everything I took out today got hauled outside the yard, mostly by wheel barrow, so very little was added to that pile.

Mostly little things to clean out here.  I am finding quite a bit of these…

… very old stumps of either maple or elm (this one is maple) that have a whole lot of suckers around it.  When I find these, I choose one that looks the strongest, straightest and healthiest, then cut away the rest, plus any dead suckers that are around as well.  After this, I’ll just need to maintain around them, cutting back suckers and doing judicious pruning, and the remaining sucker should survive.  With proper care, ten or twenty years from now, they should be very big, strong trees. :-)

I didn’t need to do a lot in this section.  A bit of clearing away in one area, and finding plenty of dead branches buried in the tall grass.

I was able to do a fair bit of clean up on the nearer willow, which you can see somewhat better in these pictures.  The willow was as far west as I worked, today.  There are two big old willows in here, including one you can see way out at the very end of the row, at the fence line.  The nearer one, unfortunately, it showing a lot of rot.  It sounded quite hollow as I worked around it.  It has had sections at the bottom cut away and, at one point, I climbed up on them to reach a dead branch to trim away, only to have one part of it collapse under my foot, because it was so rotten.  I am actually not sure how it’s still standing, to be honest.  And yet, it looks quite green and healthy at the top!

Another area that needed very little work; I mostly used the pruning saw to take down dead branches higher up.  That and removing dead branches hidden in the grass.

Here, things started needing a lot more clean up.  The wheel barrow in the background is as far West as I worked.

There were some small, dead and dying spruce trees that I took out.

Removing these is a multi-stepped process.  As you can see in the before picture, there are a lot of dead branches on the lower trunks.  I would cut away these branches from the bottom 5 or so feet, then top the tree by cutting the trunk at about 4 1/2 feet.  After dragging the top out to the wood pile, I’d then cut the remaining trunk to between 1 and 2 feet.  I will go back to them later to cut them as level to the ground as I can.

After I had topped one dead spruce tree, I starting cutting the remaining trunk at about 2 feet from the ground.  The trunk, however, would vibrate so much, my saw blade would bounce right out of the cut.   So I grabbed it and gave it a yank, watching the ground as I did.  The tree looked like it could just be torn from the ground, so I set myself up and started pulling.

Things where going well, until there was a sudden crack; the next thing I knew, I was flat on my a$$, my hat flying one way, and my glasses another.

Crud.

I very carefully squirmed to my knees, making sure there was no chance of me accidentally crushing my glasses, and began looking for them.  The problem with this was, I needed my glasses to be able to see!

Thankfully, I eventually saw some metallic reflections next to the wheel barrow.  They were fine!  What a relief.  That last thing we would have needed is the expense of a new pair of glasses!

This is why I fell.

That little tree had been dead for a good long time!

When looking through this section of spruces before, I had estimated that I would need to take out 2 out of every 3 spruces, just to get them spaced well enough to thrive.

I hoped that taking out the dead and dying trees would be enough to take care of that spacing I wanted, though they were all looking pretty dead.

I was mostly right.

As I began taking down some spruces and pruning the dead branches of the ones I hoped would survive, I worked my way over to where I figured I should take down another spruce, only to realize…

…it wasn’t a spruce at all.

It was a sad little tamarack, hidden in between the dead and dying spruces.

Spacing wise, it was right where I should be removing a tree, so I could salvage the spruces.  There was a second tamarack a couple of trees over, and that’s it.

None of them look all that healthy, to be honest.

I decided to keep the tamaracks and took out the spruce, instead.

Which turned out to be a good thing.

After topping off the spruce I had originally intended to keep, I discovered it was so weak, I was able to tear it out of the ground.

I didn’t work beyond the second tamarack.  I think there’s a different type of spruce in there.  There are some Colorado blues in there, but one of them has almost silvery needles.  There are so few living branches on it, though, it’s hard to tell if it’s a different type, or if it’s just dying.  When I get to that section, I’ll take a closer look and figure it out.

The birch trees are as far North as I’m working in this section.  Aside from picking up fallen branches from them, I didn’t do anything with the birch, yet.  From what I can see so far, they aren’t going to need much.

Here, I had some interesting finds.  While pruning the lower branches of some spruces, there were a few times where I would decide that some particular branches were high enough and strong enough to leave, but on top of them were dead branches, fallen from nearby trees!

My pruning saw has a really well designed hook at its very end that is perfect for grabbing these and pulling them down.  Some, however, had been dangling there for so long, when I tried to pull them down, they would just shatter into pieces!

Now, I think I’m going to have a hot soak in the tub.  My shoulders are a bit achy for some reason.  ;-)

The Re-Farmer