trees are not always good things

Surprise finds

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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?

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

This is what it looked like today.

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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.

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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.

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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

Clean Up: lilacs – after

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It’s been another scorcher today, but I decided to work on the lilac row in the West yard.  It was shady, and I made sure to have a water bottle with me to stay hydrated.  By mid-afternoon, though, the sun had moved far enough that my shade was gone, and it was time to stop.

Most of the work was done around just one old lilac bush!

Here is the before picture, from when I first started working in this section.

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Then after I’d cut away the false spirea (and the branch that fell on it after hitting the power line!).

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Finally, here is how it looks now.

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Lots of skinny little dead branches among the skinny little live branches! :-D  Several dead main trunks were cleaned away.  There was quite a lot of undergrowth behind the lilacs that needed to be cleared away, just to reach the lilacs themselves.  In one lilac bush towards the left in the photo, I didn’t even have to cut the trunks.  They just pulled out of the ground, or came out easily with a twist.

At some point, we’ll have to rake under there to clean up the many tiny dead twigs and branches in the leaves.  For now, I am focusing on just getting the big stuff cleaned and cleared out, while slowly working my way down the row.

It’s much slower work with the lilacs, since it involves removing so many little things, compared to working on the big trees, that’s for sure!

The Re-Farmer

Area Shift

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It was another really hot day today, so outdoor work was limited.

My daughter and I loaded the items from the sun room that we will not be using, into the storage shed, and noticed that stinking nettle was starting to crowd the stairs.  The area is in need of another mow, too.  So before things go too hot, I decided to clear away the nettles, then maybe do some mowing.

I cleared away the nettles, but it was hot enough that I didn’t want to stress the motor on the mower.

Instead, I shifted to a different area.

Some time soon, the electrician will be coming by to install the broken power pole, and also hook electricity back up to the barn.  There are some trees between the main pole, and the one between it and the barn, that will be in the way of the wires and the installation.

So I started cutting them back.

Ideally, I’d be taking them down completely.  They seem to have sprouted out of a stone pile, around a support wire for the power pole, and I could tell that they had been cut back several times in the past.  Just not recently.

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There is only two trees here; a maple and an elm.  This photo is after I’d cut away a substantial amount on one side, stopping when it simply became too hot to continue.

It’s the branches on the other side, however, that are in the way of where the power line is going to do.

Do you see the problem?

Yeah.  The car.

My father’s old car has been parked there for quite a few years.  Long enough that I think the tires are now flat.  As far as I know, however, it can still be repaired and made roadworthy without too much work; it’s not one of the scrap vehicles lying about.

If I start cutting the branches on that side, they are going to fall right on the car.

I’ve been wondering if we’d be able to pop it in neutral and push it out of the way.  If we manage it, though (I have no idea if we’ll even try, yet), it would need to be pushed back again.  We’ll have to decide soon, since I would like to have those trees cut back before the electrician needs to work in the area.

It’s unfortunate the car wasn’t parked in one of the sides of the garage, or even one of the sheds that used to shelter a tractor.  Mind you, that shed has a roof like a sieve, now, and I’d really like to have it torn down, eventually.

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This is the pile of what I’ve cleared away so far.  They are not broken down much at all, to it’s really mostly air.  Still, there are some very large sections of tree in there!

I am beginning to foresee a potential problem with having piles of cut and pruned tree pieces all over the place.

The Re-Farmer

Looking around, planning ahead

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The heat is on for the next few days, with some thunderstorms predicted by the end of the week.  This will limit what we can do in the yard, and when, for a while.

After dropping my younger daughter off for her first shift at her new job, I decided to finish up the sun room.  I’ve emptied it out completely, and mopped the concrete floor.  I’d originally intended to take a hose to it, but there is nowhere for the water to drain.

I mopped that floor three times, with many changes of water.  I swept it as much as I could, but there was just so much dust left behind!!

It is now drying, so I figured this was a good time to make a post. :-)

Yesterday was our day of rest, and I took advantage of it to just walk around, checking things out now that it’s all as green as it’s going to get, and thinking ahead.

After I finish with the area I’ve been working on for the past while, I intend to slowly work my way through the maple grove to the garden area.

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There was a time when this space was a path to the garden.  I think that stick next to the dead spruce tree is marking one side of where it used to be.

As you can see by the dead branches in the foreground, there’s more than dead spruces blocking the old path.  There is where there are a bunch of maples that had been cut down, cut into pieces, then left there.  I don’t know who started the work and then stopped part way through; for all I know, it was my late brother, which might also explain why it was left unfinished.

Before we can even start on taking down the small dead trees (the big ones will wait until we have a chain saw), I will have to clean up all the deadwood on the ground.

We’re going to have several years worth of fire wood for cookouts, by the time it’s done!

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I squeezed my way through to check out the West end of the garden space.  There, I discovered a huge mass of horseradish!  My mother had told me she’d transplanted some there, but that the younger of my brothers had plowed too close to the pole and dug it up, so she transplanted it again, under a spruce three nearer the house.  Clearly, she missed some, and it is thriving!

When I was younger, this area was pretty much all open.  Now, there is a dense, virtually impenetrable wall of trees where I remember we once had a cabbage patch.  From what I could see, along with the usual maple, elm and black spruce, I believe there is also some Colorado blue spruce and birch.

Unfortunately, the trees near the pole are tall enough that they are reaching the power lines!  I think they are still clear enough, though, that we can safely cut them down without hitting the the lines.  At the very least, we will need to thin the area down.  It is so dense, everything is fighting for survival.  I can tell quite a bit of it is deliberately planted, such as the Colorado blue spruce (not a native species) and the row of birches, plus the rows of black spruce, but I’m pretty sure there is quite a bit that is self sown.  Some of the black spruces, perhaps, and most likely the maples and elms.  I am hoping to save as much as I can; the birches look pretty good, but I will likely be removing 2 out of every 3 trees in the rows of spruces.  Though just removing the dead ones might achieve the same goal.  I would really like to save the Colorado blues.

A number of years ago, the Canadian government was encouraging people living on farms to plant more trees and shelter belts.  They had a program where people could sign up and order all kinds of trees, shipped to them for free.  I have no idea if this program is still available, but I know lots of people took advantage of it.  I am thinking that this is how my parents ended up planting so many of the trees I’m finding, including the shelter belt outside of the yard, along where the cow fence is now.

After checking this area out, I took a look at the North fence line.  At this end, there are a number of trees that look like they were deliberately planted, along with some obvious self-sown ones.  There is a gap between the big trees and the fence line, which is good.  I’d like to clear that gap, so that the fence is accessible.  Once the lilac hedge starts, though, I couldn’t see the the fence line at all, and couldn’t tell if there was a space between the bushes and the fence.  While walking along the lilacs to try and see, I did find a couple of chokecherry trees.

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There are quite a few berries forming, though a lot of them seem to have insect damage to them.  We shall see how they do throughout the season.

Eventually, I found a gap in the lilacs and went to see how close to the fence line they are and found…

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… some mystery wire.

I have no idea what kind of wire this is, other than it is NOT fence wire.  I can’t even see anything nearby that it might be from, or that might explain why it is here.

Something else I’m going to have to clear out and add to the haul-away pile.

The lilacs, meanwhile, are well into the fence line.  Not going to be able to clear a path out.  Ah, well.

As I was finishing up, I went past a bush my mother planted by the clothes line platform.  I had ruthlessly pruned it down, because it was in the way of trying to hang things on the line.

It seems to have like the pruning, because it is now completely dense with foliage, and covered with flower buds, including one early bloomer!

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Based on how many buds I’m seeing, by the time this bush is in full bloom, we’ll hardly be able to see any leaves at all; it’ll be a mass of white!

I’m rather looking forward to seeing that.

Well, I think the sun room floor has had enough time to dry.  Now I have to decide what to put back, and what will have to go into storage!

By the end of the day, we should finally have a usable sun room. :-)

The Re-Farmer

This is concerning, plus progress

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Not a lot was done in the yard today.  We made a much needed dump run with garbage and recycling – including a lot of garbage from cleaning the sun room out, then my younger daughter and I went into town to run some errands (plus play some Pokemon Go for community day, while we were there ;-) ).  It was almost evening when we got back, but I still wanted to get at least a bit more clean up done today.

As I headed over to the Eastern end of of the bushes and trees I’ve been clearing out, I found something very disorienting.

In the false spirea I was planning to clean out was a large branch.

Funny, I think to myself.  I thought I’d cleared away the crab apple branches I’d cut.  Did I miss one?

Except this branch wasn’t a dead branch.  It was mostly green.  I didn’t remember cutting a green branch in that area and leaving it there.  Also, it wasn’t apple.

Then I started to pull it out and saw the end of it.

At which point, I stopped to take pictures.

Here is the branch I found.

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It’s a maple.  Aside from a couple of small dead side branches, it is in full leaf.

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That’s burnt wood right there.

What the heck?

I started looking around to see where it came from.  Then I called my daughters out to look, too, just to make sure I wasn’t jumping to conclusions.

This is where we think it came from.

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The arrow at the top is pointing to the end of a branch that we think it came from.

The double ended arrow is between the two power lines.

If my guess is correct, some time during the night, the branch hit the live power line, got burned, then broke and fell down.

Now, I can’t say for sure that this is where it came from, but it must at least be close to the source.  There just aren’t any other maples close enough.

I am not feeling confident about this.

I had asked for the electric company to come out and check the line a second time when, after the first time they came out, the woman who followed up with me could not see anything that said they’d checked more than our own power line to the house.  The second call, I basically was told the same thing as the first time; whenever we hire someone to clear the lines, let them know and they’ll cut the power for us.  I don’t know when anyone came to check the lines a second time; this was after we had to put locks on our gates, and we did not get a call from anyone to let them in.  However, someone could have stopped on the main road and simply ducked through the barbed wire fencing.  The locks just keep vehicles out.  People can get through easily.

I’ll be asking some advice from family who works with the electric company before I call them again.  There’s no point in calling again, if they expect us to clear their lines.

After clearing the burned branch away, I cut back the spirea completely.  Here is the before picture from a few days ago.

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All I did was cut away the spirea, plus break off a few dead lilac branches that were overhanging them, so I wouldn’t stab myself in the face or something.

Here is how it looks now.

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To the right of the lilacs was the beginning of a path to the big garden.  It is now almost clear and open again.  At least at this end.  The other end has dead spruces partially blocking it.

Here is another look at the lilacs.

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You can see where I broke off the branches that were overhanging the spirea.  Most of the lilacs appear dead.  These lilacs used to be so thick with greenery and flowers, you couldn’t see stems and branches.

It should be interesting to see how they recover, once all this is cleared up and they are getting sun and space again.  It might take a few years, but lilacs are so resilient, I am sure they will grow back well.

There is still lots of work to do, but it doesn’t take much for it to look so much better.

The Re-Farmer

Clean Up: Firepit area gate

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After cleaning up in the bushes near the fire pit yesterday, today’s goal was to access the gate by the fire pit, before continuing in that area.  We needed someplace to pile the wood we’re cleaning out.

Before I could start on that, though, my younger daughter and I made a trip into town.  She had dropped off some resumes a few days ago.  The next day, one place called back, but she was with me at the shop with the mower, so they asked her to call back the next day.

That was yesterday.  They booked an interview with her for this morning.

And by “interview”, it turned out they meant, “what hours can you work and here are your free t-shirts.”

Starting next week, my daughter begins training as a cashier at the grocery store we usually shop at. :-D

That was a nice way to start the day!

So I didn’t get started on accessing the gate until this afternoon.

Here is what it looked like before.

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The far end of the gate is completely hidden by overgrown lilacs, caraganas and a maple tree.

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The picket fence thing that was there appeared to be attached to the barb wire gate only by this length of wire, twisted around, and one section of the top barb wire looped around a board.   So it wasn’t going to take much to separate them.

But first, I needed to clear the gate post.

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Most of what I had to clear away was from a lilac bush, including a lot of dead branches and stems.  My mother likely planted it there, so I didn’t want to cut it all away.  The maple would have seeded itself, and likely the caragana as well.

I’ve left most of the caragana for now, but when it comes time to take down the two dead spruce trees, we might have to cut those back more.  We shall see when the time comes.

That done, I could open the barb wire gate.

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The closure of which promptly broke in my hands.

All the wood there is really quite rotten.

Some of the barb wire has come loose from the posts.  The fence part also had boards coming loose.  It’s all really quite rotten.

Have I mentioned that much of the wood around here is really old and rotten?  I think I might have… ;-)

It took some doing to get the fence part loose.  Hidden in the tall grass were fallen branches that had to be moved, and the grass itself – including years of thatch – had a good grip on the bottom of it!

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I decided to leave the fence part like this for now, so that it’s visible.  There are so many nails in that thing, I don’t want to take any chances of someone stepping on it.

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Speaking of nails, it turned out that part of the fence was indeed attached, by wire, to the gate post.  This length of board, however, was no longer attached to the fence part.  Even with all those nails!

I count 20.

While getting all this open, I could see something blue peaking through the grass.  Once done, I yanked it out to see what it was.

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It seems to be a bell for a child’s bike.

Why was it there, and how many years as has it been there?

That done, I moved the barb wire gate to the outside of the yard, then cleaned up all the cut wood from clearing the gate, plus the pile from yesterday.

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Since I had all that handy wood, I fixed the broken closure on the gate.

Here is the after picture.

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There’s going to be a lot more to be added to the pile over the next while, so I am leaving the gate open for now.

All of this was about two hours of work.  Not too shabby!  I’ve stopped for the afternoon, though.  I plan to continue where I left off yesterday, but we were getting into the hotted part of the day, so I will wait until the early evening, when it starts to get cooler.  Now that this is done, I’ll be able to clean things up right away, too.

I placed the pile far enough away to completely clear the open gate, plus leave room to access the fence, if necessary.  Seeing the fence from this side, I was reminded that, at some point, it would be good to re-fence the entire house yard.  All of it, including the fence lines that are bordered by roads, if possible.  I say “if possible” because they are so full of trees, and my mother’s lilac border along the garden section.  It would be good to have something other than barbed wire fencing and gates!  I would still want to have a gate here, by the fire pit, and the one by the garden.  I’d even like to add another gate to the south fence line, so that we could drive into the yard at one end, then out again at the other.

Hmmm.  Thinking of it that way, it might just be easier to build a new fence on the other side of the driveway.   And if we do that, may as well extend to the fence that’s keeping the renter’s cows out.  Get rid of the current house yard fencing, completely.  Wow.  That would really extend the size of our yard!

That, however, is likely many years into the future.  Still, it’s something we can talk about and plan for.

Later.

I have to keep reminding myself.  This year is our “figure it out” year, and the focus for now is on the house and yard.

That is plenty of work all on its own! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: before

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I plan to work my way down the front of the row of trees and bushes in the West yard, from the fire pit area towards the flower garden.  I’ve started at the linden tree at one end.  Here are the areas I will work on next.

Like the maple and spruce groves, when I was a kid, I used to be able to mow in between the trees and bushes here.

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Nearest the linden and plum trees I’ve already cleared is this tree.  I don’t know what it is, but a lot of the leaves are turning yellow with black spots on them.  I’ve done a quick search, and it might be a fungal disease.  If so, I might have to do some serious work on it – but first I have to get to it through the undergrowth!

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I’m going to have to somehow get to that dead tree in the middle of some false spirea and… some other bush.  I think the dead tree used to be another plum.

I like the false spirea.  Really, I do!  But my goodness, they are invasive!

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This crab apple tree seems to be doing okay.  It’s got lots of bitty apples starting, no bigger than rose hips right now.  It is still going to be needing some pruning…

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More self-sown false spirea at the end if this row, and you can see some of the deadwood on the crab apple tree.

Also, I think you can see some surviving lilacs.

You can’t see them in any of the other pictures, but there used to be two rows of lilacs behind all these trees and bushes.  I remember how, at the end where the linden tree is now, the two rows of lilacs formed a natural tunnel that I used to be able to crawl into.

Now, I’m not sure how many of them have survived, blocked as they are from the sun by the overgrowth.

I hope to start cleaning up these areas over the next few days, weather willing.

The Re-Farmer

Clean Up: at the linden tree

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Since we are starting to use the fire pit area fairly regularly, and plan to use it more, I decided to start cleaning up the next area of trees and bushes nearby.  There is a linden tree at the end of a row that I wanted to clear the base of, but before I could get to it, I started clearing at a plum tree next to it.

I forgot to take a before picture, but here is how it looked before I started on the linden tree.

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The poor plum tree is really struggling.  It was being choked out by a caragana that I cut away, and has a lot of dead and dying branches.  I am hoping, as things are cleared out, it will become stronger.

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It does have baby plums, though!

This variety of plums have very small, hard red fruit.  Not much good for eating, but I remember my dad had made wine with them.  I was pretty young and probably never got a taste of it, but I seem to remember it being quite enjoyed by the adults.

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This is the pile I started, with the dead wood from around the plum tree, the caragana that was crowding it, and the first sucker from the linden tree that I’d cut away.

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Here is a before picture of the linden tree.  You can’t even tell I’ve already cut some away.

My mother told me that, before she moved away from the farm, she kept the base of the linden tree clear of suckers, so I will continue that.  It has clearly been many years since they’ve been cleared away!  Some were huge and lying on the ground long enough to be partly buried in decayed leaves.

Linden wood, I discovered, is incredibly soft.  I was able to saw through the suckers like they were barely there!  In one group, because of how close they were, I ended up cutting three of them at the same time, and it was still easy to saw through them all!

I also found a lot of dead branches stuck among the suckers, and others handing above.  The bottom branches of the main truck were also either dead or mostly dead, hidden away by the foliage from the suckers growing below.

Once I started cutting I could see, at the base of the trunk, where my mother had been cutting away over the years.

Here is how it looks now.

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I probably shouldn’t have, but I did leave one sucker be, just trimming away some of the lower branches.  Unlike the other ones, this one was growing upwards and straight.

Aside from cutting away self-sown mystery saplings among the debris, this is just the difference of cutting away the suckers and taking out the deadwood.  Later, I plan to take a rake to it and get the bits of branches and twigs left behind, then take the weed trimmer to it.

There is a bush directly behind it that is looking like it has a lot of deadwood on it, but I won’t start working back there, quite yet.

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I had started out trying to keep the deadwood and the green wood in separate piles, but after a while, just gave up!  We will sort through it as we break it down and move it elsewhere.

Our piles for the fire pit are getting a bit big!

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This is our “small stuff” pile.  Twigs and small branches, mostly.  Just today, I added more deadwood that I’d pulled down from the area behind the other house.  I wasn’t up to breaking them down, first.

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Then there are the bigger logs, including some that have been cut to fire pit length.  On the far left of the photo are a bunch of logs I’d cut from the big dead branch I’d cut free from one of the nearby maples.  It was one of the things I had to clean up before I could mow.  I didn’t even break it all down; just enough to more easily move the top length to the “small stuff” pile.

The branch I’d found at the fence line earlier, I just left at the fence line for now.  We are adding deadwood faster than we are using it for fuel for our wiener roasts, and the “small stuff” pile is getting too big!  As for the greenwood, I don’t even know where we’re going to put those, for now.  I don’t want to add much more to the pile by the log cabin, and the one by the garage is pretty huge.

Maybe if I can get that gate by the fire pit open, we can start another greenwood pile outside the yard, closer to where I’m actually working.

It doesn’t take much to make a big difference!

The Re-Farmer

Look what I found

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Yesterday, I’d done the south lawns, including along the fence line and behind the “spare” house (more as a space to turn around with the mower, than to cut anything, since there’s barely any grass there).

Today, I set aside hoses, picked up branches, and so on, before I finished mowing the rest of the lawn.

Later, I went back behind the other house to see if I could get down some more of the dead branches.  A lot of it involved simply reaching up with the extended pruning saw, which has a hook at the point, grabbing onto an attached dead branch, or dangling broken branch, and yanking until it fell to the ground.

I even remembered to take a picture of how it looks, after my daughters did such a great job raking up under there.

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Which is when I found this.

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The branch is so big, I actually missed it at first, thinking it was just another part of a tree.  Nope.  A big ole branch broke, some time after I’d mowed here yesterday, and was hung up in the other trees.

I couldn’t even tell which tree it came from.

In the picture, you can just see the power line that goes from the other house, to the pump shack (which isn’t hooked up now, thank God!).  It wasn’t on the power line, but the branch that it was stuck on, is just above the power line.

Once again, I used the extended pruning saw to grab and yank it down, though I did have to cut down a branch from the tree outside the yard that was hanging over the fence, and in the way.

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Finding stuff like this is why I’m on such a drive to get the dead and dying branches down, as much as possible.  We’ve got entire trees that are ready to come down, almost on their own.  One is right in this area, in fact; I cut away some of the lower branches that I kept getting hung up on, and the entire tree was shaking and making cracking noises at the base.  I could probably push it right over, if it wouldn’t fall directly on that power line I mentioned earlier.

After this, I did some other clean up in the yard, but I will post about it later.  After I shower.  I keep finding little bits of dead tree stuck in my hair!

The Re-Farmer

Dead Wood Down

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

When today’s fire pit fire was almost burned down, I just couldn’t help myself.  My tools were still out, and there was this big dead branch that I really wanted to take down.

I had started to cut through it with the extended pruning saw, a while ago, so I just had to continue.

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Towards the end of it, the pressure from the branch got my pruning saw stuck, so I had to take it out, then finish the last fraction of an inch with the hand saw.

This is the branch, completely cut through.

It wasn’t moving.  At all.

This is why.

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The branch had long been rubbing on a branch in the tree next to it.  Now that it was cut, it was just leaning and being held up by this other branch.

We use a steel pole we found somewhere in the yard to move the wood around in the fire, so I used that to push the branch off the trunk.

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Alrighty, then.  I’ve got the base down, but it’s still hung up on the other tree.

After moving the barrel, I pulled the base of the branch out until it fell into the V of the other tree.  I then swung it around to the right until I broke a branch that you can see higher up, which freed the main branch up and I could finally pull it away until the old, rotting wood at the top broke under its own weight, and it came down.

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Then I had to go back and pull down the broken pieces that were still stuck in the other tree.

You can see the wound in the branch or the other tree, where it was being rubbed for so many years.

This is probably the last of the big dead branches to come down in this area.  There are others, but they are too high to cut, even with the extended pruning saw.  I can add another extension and might even be able to reach them, but reaching them and cutting them is something else entirely.  There are also others that are partly dead, that I have to decide on cutting down entirely, or leaving for now.

It felt good to finally get this big one down.

All this clean up, however, is making it very difficult for us to use up the pile of dead wood for the fire pit!  We keep adding more than we are burning.

We’re just going to keep having lots of cook outs. :-D

The Re-Farmer