We have a few ash tress on our property that unfortunately met up with the ash borer beetle. In the middle of the summer, I would be staring up at the sky and notice that there weren’t any leaves on a few trees. This reminds me of a funny story where Mom said to me “I think that tree over there is dead.” “Oh really? How can you tell?” “Because it’s August and it doesn’t have any leaves!” I now realize I’m not the most intelligent person when it comes to the outdoors.
Front yard before the cull
Anyhow, after some searching around and getting some estimates around town, I found out that my neighbour has a lumberjack friend that would help us out for a great deal. Hey, I can’t complain about a friends and family discount of $100 a tree!
Of course it had to be pouring rain on us the entire Saturday that we worked. Bringing down trees is quite the activity. Cut the tree down, take the branches over to Claude’s fire pit, burn them, then cut the tree into blocks of wood. Move the blocks of wood over to an area where we would split them later. These were pretty large trees…one of the ones in my front yard was 42 years old, older than the house itself!
I have to say that we were moving at a decent pace for the first four trees and then we stopped to have lunch and of course it’s always harder to go back out into the rain after being in a warm house!
There was one tree leaning directly towards the house so we set up a cable attached to another tree to convince it to fall away from the house. Four of us were pulling on the cable as the tree started coming down. I looked to my right and saw the wife of the guy cutting the tree hauling on the cable. I realized I should be putting a LOT more effort into pulling on this cable when it was coming down! We lucked out and the thing fell within inches of hitting the eaves trough at the corner of the house! Phew! We screamed in excitement about how we managed to avoid disaster. I have to say I wasn’t even thinking it was a possibility but you could see that the guy cutting the tree definitely wasn’t happy that it came so close to the house. I can understand…it’s a lot of worry on his part!
We ended up with a backyard full of branches and we thought it would take all Fall to burn it but I’m happy to report that we got half of it burnt by the end of the weekend. Yes, there is this giant pile of ashes in Claude’s back yard now, but we’ll deal with that later.
The sun came out on Sunday which was a welcome sight. We started splitting the wood early in the morning and by mid afternoon we were piling it. Vero and I managed to get it all done next to our garage and ready for the winter. I don’t even know how many cords of wood we have but I have four large trees worth.
My body is quite sore but the job is done and I have to say we didn’t encounter any issues…just a lot of grunt work for the job to get done!