tamarack

Settling in, little by little

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I did my rounds around the yard this evening, and it’s really something to see how everything is settling in for the winter.

While I have been fighting those invasive vines all over the place all summer, there is one area where I am keeping them.  They are, after all, quite pretty, when under control!  They have gone to seed, now, and are all covered with lovely little puffs.

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I spent some time going around the yard, picking up the fallen branches, and going through where I cleaned things up in the maple grove.

When talking to my family about what I was finding, I mentioned the rows of trees that were planted too close together, with many dying because of it, and how I wanted to eventually transplant the three poor little tamarack trees.  One family member told me to just cut them down to give the other trees space.

Nope!  Not going to do that.  I really want to save these trees.

This is one of the reasons why.

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They turn a most glorious golden yellow in the fall!

In the future, I would really love to plant more of them!

It’s not unusual, when I make my way through the yard, for me to have a cat follow me.  That’s typically when Rolando Moon makes an appearance.  Otherwise, it’s Beep Beep or Butterscotch.

Today, I had two cats following me!

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Beep Beep and her boy!

Later, my younger daughter helped me move some leaf piles onto the flower garden by the Old Kitchen.  The girls have been raking the grass, but with the latest drop of leaves, it’s rather yard to tell in some places! :-D  We are starting to use the leaves as mulch in different areas as well as adding more to the garden – and that’s without doing any raking at all in between the trees!  Those will be left to decompose where they are.  We’ll just stay on top of picking up fallen branches in those areas.

Earlier today, we made a trip into town to get some prescription refills.  When they were ready, the pharmacist went through the three bottles with me.  There was supposed to be four, however.  So she went back to check what happened.  It turned out that, for some reason, the insurance wasn’t coming up to cover that one at all.  They figured it was a glitch in the system.

They ended up giving me the refill, without charging us for it now.  When I come back in about a week, for some other refills, they will charge us for it then.

Which kinda blows me away.

When we had issues with insurance, shortly after moving here, the Costco pharmacy my husband had set up with wanted to charge him full price. We didn’t even know there was a problem until they wanted some $400, when we should only have been paying $40 or so.  It was a most frustrating experience, and my husband went without some of his medications for a long time before the mess was fixed – and then even longer, because the fix put him at the wrong rate, which meant we still couldn’t afford it.

I’m rather glad we are with this pharmacy, now!

One of the benefits of going with a small town pharmacy, instead of one in the city!

Something to be thankful for, for sure!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up; west fence area trees

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We had another cooler day today; after this it’s supposed to heat up again, so I took advantage of it to continue in the west yard trees.  I am so close to being finished here (I’ve decided not to do the rest of the fence line itself for now), I’m getting excited, because it means I can finally move on to the spruce grove perimeter. :-D  I’d like to get as much as I can done there, before I have to stop for the year.

The first thing I did was finally take down the two dead trees by the smaller willow. (The before and after pictures are taken from opposite directions)

The one that was about midway between the two willows was a bit of a job.  It was tall enough, and leaning enough, that it was well into the branches of the big willow.  Which means that, after I cut the trunk, the base just swung over to the big willow, and there it hung.  It did not want to come down!

The wood from these trees is going to be kept for the fire pit.

The tall stumps are being left until we get a full size chainsaw.

On to the next area…

There’s not a lot of visible difference here, since I worked in this area yesterday.  I took down the dead half of the maple trees.  After that, most of what I did was take down dead branches from above, except from the one mostly dead spruce that will be taken down entirely.

Next areas; the last of those rows of spruces!

Also, I found a third little tamarack hiding in them.

It really looked like a spindly, dead spruce.  I honestly probably should have taken it out, but I really want to keep the tamarack. I also should probably have thinned the spruces out more, too, because of how close together they are, but they look strong and healthy enough to make it.  So for now, they will stay.  Next year, perhaps, we can transplant the tamarack, instead.

After this, I finally got to working among the beeches.

The before picture, I’d taken yesterday.  If you look along the beeches, you can see a single trunk, slightly out of line.

It turned out not to be a trunk at all.  It was a branch that had fallen straight, and was standing there, held up by the other branches!  You can even see the broken bit it had come from.

I’ve been finding quite a lot of dead branches held up by others.  One I pulled down earlier and moved out today, filled the wheelbarrow all on its own!

In the northernmost row, I found another Colorado Blue spruce, with an elm tree growing right next to it.  Well.  Two elms, really, right up against each other.

The spruce was planted deliberately; the elm would not have been.  Because of how big a Colorado Blue can potentially get, I took out the elm and some small maples near it as well.  I probably should have taken out the maple to the right of the foreground in the after photo too, but it seems to be doing okay.  We’ll see how the spruce survives.

Here’s another view of the rows.

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By this point, I didn’t really have the energy to keep breaking down the cut pieces and hauling them out of the yard, or dragging out entire trees.  I opened the gate at this end, so I wouldn’t be weaving through trees to the gate by the fire pit, then around the pile.  Instead, I was pushing my way through really tall grass, and wearing down a path.  As I was taking down bigger and bigger dead branches, and thinning out more trees, I just started piling it all in the space that had been plowed.  I will drag it out another day.

The row of trees closest to the beeches appears to be all crab apple trees.  Most have no apples, and the one that does, has almost none on it.  This is not a good place to plant fruit trees. :-/

Moving along the rows…

This area is not complete, though I might not do much more than this, this year.  The elms in the north row needed to be thinned out; one was right up against another, and it turned out to be dead.  The larger maple to the right in the photo will also be thinned down.  The side branches would have been suckers that never got pruned back when they should have.  The main trunk in the middle is suffering for it.  I wasn’t able to get all the dead branches out of it, and won’t be able to reach a lot of them until the side trunks are cleared out.

Once that is done, it will allow more light to reach the apple trees, too.

Speaking of which…

This is where I was working when I stopped to take a phone call.  Which was well timed.  I was at the point of telling myself it was really time to stop for the day, but I kept doing just a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit…  and before I knew it, an hour had passed. :-D

I don’t know that I’ll be able to work in here again over the next few days, but when I do get back to it, I will continue thinning the crab apple trees out.  There is a big one at the end, with large branches reaching towards the power pole.  That part of it is covered with apples (it looks like another of the ornamental apples trees, they are so tiny), but only where the morning sun touches those leaning branches.  The rest of the tree is struggling, with few leaves and many dead branches.  It’s all just too crowded in there, with elm and maple tangled around each other in the canopy, blocking the light for most of the day.

The eastern end of this area of trees is where they are growing under the power line, and where the arborist will be trimming some of them back.  They can do the tall stuff.  I will do the short stuff! :-)

When I came out after my phone call to get the last after pictures, I got a couple of others of interest.

Last month, I decided to take down a small elm tree because it was growing directly under the power lines.  As I have been doing in many other places, I left a tall stump to go back to later.  You can see it here, next to the spruce tree I’d pruned the lower branches from.

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This is what it looks like, now.

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Maples and elms are very resilient trees.  You can cut them back like this, and they will start growing back!

I could leave it to grow, and just keep pruning it short so it will never reach the power lines.

I don’t know if that’s a good idea, though.

A decision I can make another time.  For now, I will leave it and see how it does.

Later, while visiting Beep Beep and her kittens by the old garden shed, I saw something I’ve been finding in a number of places around the yard.

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A whole bunch of holes, dug into the ground.

I’ve found some in the open area between rows of trees behind the storage house.  Now that I’ve cleared up so much of the trees, I’m starting to find them there, too.  I am guessing it’s a small animal digging up insects or grubs?  Some of the holes are quite deep.

Anyone know what might be making these holes?

The Re-Farmer

Clean up, west maple grove, continues

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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…

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… 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.

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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.

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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…

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…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