Fall yardwork

Shortly after we moved in here at 515 I posted this picture of the house …….

… and Jim Vancha quickly commented that he expected there was a chainsaw in my future.  As it turned out a Dewalt reciprocating saw did the trick just fine.  There are a lot of advantages to the Dewalt solution: its lighter, much lighter, it starts immediately when you squeeze the trigger, it doesn’t stink, it doesn’t puke oil and when the blade gets dull you chuck it and put in a new sharp one.  I used to own a really nice Husky 266 with a 26 inch bar but the more I think about it the less I miss it.

We’d been holding off on cutting the trees until Marilyn’s new toy showed up and it arrived yesterday.  I spent last night putting it together.  Its incredibly well built but the assembly instructions were equally incredibly poorly written. In spite of the instructions I got it together and we fired it up today.  It easily chewed through six inch branches.  The specs claim that it will handle eight inch diameter and I expect it would.  The challenge is to get the branches that stick out from the trunk to feed in so even a branch that is much smaller than the nominal capacity may jam up and not feed through.  All in all though it worked remarkably well and we reduced several relatively large trees to a surprisingly small pile of wood chips.

Neighbour Keith was having as much fun as we were.  As soon as I fired up the tractor he was right in the middle of the project. When we got done our trees we pruned several obnoxious branches off his trees and quickly reduced them to wood chips as well.  We were clearly dealing with our own trees on our own property but in Keith’s case we were mutilating the village’s trees.  I hope that doesn’t come back to haunt us.

Now we’ll have to paint the house because you can actually see it.  Once we got the trees out of the way I fired up the little Kubota and yanked out a couple of stumps.  It was a little spooky working that close to the house but I didn’t damage anything.  Apparently the plan is to allow the cedars by the front steps to regrow.  I don’t get to make the plans – I’m just the goof that helps to make them happen.