In the early light of the morning, I could just barely see something odd in the west yard, through the bathroom and sun room windows.
A dark something that I thought might be a lounging cat or something, at first. Except it didn’t move.
So I made sure to check when I was outside in better light.
You know those shallow holes I’ve been finding around the yard?
This one was not so shallow. LOL
I wonder what’s so tasty in our dirt that’s worth this much effort? :-D
The Re-Farmer
Yes!!!
It is finally done!
The maple grove/west yard trees are now finally cleared, trimmed and cleaned up. After this, there will just be the basic maintenance to be taken care of in this area for the rest of the year. Aside from maybe trimming the tall stumps, if we get a full size chainsaw before winter.
What a difference!
When I headed out today, the first priority was to clean up the branches and trees from last time. In the process, I went digging around for downed branches under the last bit of trees I needed to work on, grabbed what I thought was a branch and found…
… metal.
This is what I dragged out.
I haven’t the foggiest clue what it is.
It went on the junk pile by the old garden shed.
Once I did that, I broke out the weed trimmer and went to town in all the areas I’ve been working on that hadn’t been trimmed yet.
Oh, my, does it ever look awesome!!! (click on the pictures)
While I was using the weed trimmer, I kept having to stop and pull more branches out of the dead leaves, as I found them with the line on the trimmer. My daughters cleaned away what they could find. I had been taking what I cleared out of the last section (photos below) to the pile out of the yard, but by the end of the day, I was getting too tired to do both. It was quite pleasant to work among the trees, but once I got out of the yard with the wheel barrow, or dragging a tree or two, it was like walking into a wall of heat. So I started leaving things to the side, then the girls did a fantastic job of cleaning it all away, later.
While I wasn’t going to work on the rest of the fence line, I did go in with the weed trimmer. I took the before picture when I last worked in the area a few days ago.
There was just the last bit to work on, over by the power pole (see below). I went into it with the weed trimmer as much as I could, but there was a section by the gooseberry bush I couldn’t reach, because I kept getting stabbed by low hanging and dead branches!
This side will probably need to be thinned down more, but I will wait and see how the remaining trees do over the next year or two. If the maples do well, I might trim the elms to give them more room to grow, because maples can get so huge. If the elms do well, I may trim the maples. The maple I’m standing next to as I take the photo (in the foreground, to the right) is going to need thinning, but it can wait.
Several times, I started to clear a maple, then thought, oh… it’s actually an elm. No, it’s a maple. No, it’s… both??
There were groups of trees where maple and elm were growing against each other. !!
This next section shows some apple trees.
In the before picture, there is a crab apple tree that is part of the row of crab apples in the middle of this area, but this one had so many little apple trees growing around it. Likely self seeded, as apples fell over the years. As I went through them, trying to figure out what to keep and what to take out, I discovered the biggest one – the one that would have been originally planted – was almost entirely dead. It had two younger ones growing next to it, so I left those. They are too close together, but I will see which of them does better over the next few years, before deciding if they need to be thinned more.
The major challenge was the big ornamental apple tree. The branches were so twisted and wrapped around each other, with living tangled up with the dead. It was a struggle to get them free of each other. Most of it was growing towards the East – the morning sun would be the only real sunlight it would be getting – and that’s there all the little apples is had are hanging from.
There were so many dead branches higher up on all of these trees. The extended pruning saw got quite a workout. Not just to pull down or cut dead branches, but to untangle them to get them down.
Sadly, I was not able to use my little electric chain saw/extended pole pruner. I checked it over thoroughly (it’s really designed to be idiot proof) and everything looked good. Yet when I tried to use it, it started screaming and immediately began to jam. It was also dripping chain oil. :-(
Time to see how long the warranty is for. :-( Or if it’s still covered. All I can think of that’s different that might be an issue is the chain oil. The oil it came with was perfectly clear, like water. The chain oil I have now is generic, and red. The paperwork did recommend using their brand of chain oil, but it seems not to be available in Canada.
This rather sucks, because it did make work go much faster, when it was working!
Still, I have the tools I need to do the job, and the next time I am able to work on the trees, it will be at the spruce grove! Woo Hoo!!!
I love this work. :-D
The Re-Farmer
This evening, I decided to be methodical about clearing the west yard trees, and get right into the fence line.
It was a lot more work than I expected!
This is what it looked like when I left it last time.
I didn’t get photos from this angle today, but if you look behind the dead trees I cut down, that’s the area I focused on.
I had not really intended to start on the fence line on this side yet, but the mess was starting to get to me.
I am using the row of elm trees as my guide line for clearing the fence. Anything between where those trees are and the fence line will be taken out. This will leave a walkable path to access the fence.
I started at the gate post and made a discovery.
There’s two of them.
From what I can figure out, as the older gate post started to become unstable, a second post as added, and new and old were tied together with a loop of barbed wire.
It was most likely a temporary fix that ended up a permanent one.
The problem is…
Both posts are rotten and broken at the bottom.
The hedge that had grown into the fence was pretty much the only thing holding it up.
I don’t really want to replace this fence. I’d rather take it out completely. I am wanting to install new fencing that will include both driveways, instead. So for now, this old fence will remain for as long as it holds up.
As I worked down the line, I also discovered that there’s not just two gate posts, but two fences! Somewhere along the way, the old barbed wire fence got a mesh wire fence added with it. Then other cable type wire was also added, along the bottom. You can see part of it at the bottom of one of the gate posts, above.
This made clearing away the lilacs more challenging, because it was woven through both the barbed and mesh wire. For many of them, I had to cut them at least twice, so I could get the pieces out of the fence.
A surprising amount of the lilac was already dead. Most of the living lilac is on the other side of the fence. Which I will leave for now. It’s keeping the fence from falling over.
In the end, it took me almost two hours to clear barely 8 feet of fence line!
I’m also clearing in between and around the lilac and caragana that is in line with the row of elm trees. That included taking down a dead lilac that was a thick as a tree!
I’m going to have to change up when I work in the yard. We’re getting heat wave weather warnings for the next week. I like to do the work in the afternoon or evening, but the hottest part of the day tends to be around 5pm. It’s almost 9pm as I write this, and we’re still at 25C, with a “feels like 29C”. I’m going to have to start working on this stuff in the morning, instead, when it’s cooler, because by afternoon, it’s supposed to reach 29C, and feel like 34C, but be only 18C in the morning.
I am not a morning person. :-D
Well, if I’m driving my daughter to her shifts that start at 8 or 9am anyway, it will work out for me to do yard work when I get back in the morning, instead of after I pick her up at 4 or 5pm.
She has a road test booked in September. She’ll be able to drive herself to work, if we don’t need the van for something else.
It is becoming increasingly clear we are going to need a second vehicle for the girls. That and our utter dependency on having a vehicle makes me extra paranoid about having only one. It’s not like there are any buses we could use instead, or anything is close enough to walk to! We went about a month not driving our van until we had the money to replace the fuel pump, to avoid causing more damage (which our mechanic really appreciated), and that was enough for us!
At least we’ve finally reached a point where we are caught up. As of this month, we have no expenses left related to our move. Yay! It only took us 9 months. :-/ Starting next month, we can start diverting money to a contingency fund to pay for things like getting the trees cleared from the power lines and roof in the fall, or towards getting a second bathroom installed. Or unexpected emergencies, like the van breaking down!
The problem is, there are SO many things that need work around the house and yard, it will be hard to prioritize. We had hoped to get the second bathroom installed this summer. It’s high on the priority list, but clearing the trees became the higher priority since… well… we’d really like to NOT have our roof damaged or have branches knock out our power lines.
Little by little, it’ll get done.
The Re-Farmer
Today, I went back to around the west side of the maple grove to continue cleaning up. This time, however, I focused on the area nearest the fire pit and gate. This area seemed to have been mostly spruces, though only a few have survived.
Let’s look at the before pictures.
This spruce tree is right behind one of our piles of wood for the fire pit. It’s doing rather well, though as with most spruces, the lowest branches on the trunk were dead and hidden by the ones above.
Right at the wood pile is an elm tree that we thought was dead, but after we finally got some decent rain, suddenly shot out some green. It is still mostly dead, but we’ll be leaving it for now.
Most of the spruces behind it are completely dead. Only two are still alive, plus one scrawny little thing that I’m hoping will survive now that I’ve cleared away the dead stuff.
I went further under the trees for these next photos.
Going through here, looking at all the dead wood, all I could think of was “that’s a fire hazard, that’s a fire hazard, that’s a fire hazard…”
I started by pruning the spruce in the top photo and working my way in a bit, then went to taking down the two bigger dead spruces. These ones have been making a mess of my nerves, every time we used the fire pit and a breeze blew towards them!
I took the bigger one down first, because it was easier to get at.
When it finally started to drop, it got hung up on the trees on the other side of the gate. The cut part also just stayed on the trunk. I finally grabbed a piece of wood from the log pile and swung it like a baseball bat against the trunk.
It still just dropped straight down, being held up by the other trees.
I finally got it to fall, though!
After this, I cut the tree up into small sections so I could move it and work on the next one.
Which also got stuck and needed whacking.
It, too, was being held up by the trees on the other side of the gate.
My older daughter happened to come out to ask me something, so she got to do the whacking…
And also got it down from the other trees.
After this, I took down the two smaller dead spruces.
Then I realized I had completely blocked the gate, so the smaller stuff I would have taken to the pile outside the yard with a wheel barrow had to wait.
Here are the after pictures.
In the foreground is the spruce from the top photo. As I cleaned up after taking down the dead spruces, including cutting back some spreading lilac and caragana, I kept finding more and more dead stuff, buried under dead leaves and grass, and especially along the fence line.
I’m leaving the stumps of the trees I took down for now. You can see the pruned trunks of the two remaining spruces here; the skinnier one has just a few live branches at the top. There are still dead branches I want to prune away, but for those, I’ll need the extended pruner, so it will wait for now.
There’s still lots to clear out of here but, at this point, the heat was becoming and issue and I was getting ready to head inside.
The remains of the 4 dead spruces I took down, plus some of the larger dead pieces I dragged out while cleaning up. Lots of dead caragana and lilac hidden among the living. It seemed every time I thought I was done, I kept finding more and more to pull out!
I was just taking these last photos when my daughters came out to haul it all out of the yard for me.
They are so awesome!
Though it’s no where near done, the difference is still pretty amazing.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 