Tired of Trees

 

This is Day Four of cutting these trees.  Day Six all together because there was a day of burning and a day of finer cleanup.  This is the last of the dangerous work and we are glad it is over.  There was one tall Ash in there that was so dead and so brittle that we were really worried about cutting it.  The vibration of the chainsaw alone could break it up and send the top spearing down at whomever was below it.  Every morning after a substantial wind we would look out the window and hope to see the top down.  But no such luck.

All told there were seven completely dead Ash, a very one sided Oak, a wisp of a Hemlock and about two dozen small Ash saplings that wouldn't amount to anything.  We were able to cut all of these without damaging any of the Viburnum bushes.

While the guys were working on the trees, I helped clear some "Tiger Lilies" (actually day lilies) from the back of our mulch bunkers.  This is the raised bed garden that my husband built for the neighbors back in 2018.  We put the orange ditch lilies along the back of the bunkers to hide the ugly recycled boards.  The ditch lilies came from our frontage back in 2016 when we put in our water service.  We dug them up, stuck them on a dirt pile in the woods for two years, and then transplanted them into this spot.  While they are quite pretty and protected from deer, we all decided the bed would be better used for strawberries or something.  So I offered to help make them gone.  As I write they are filling in low spots up in the area where we took all of those big pine trees out two years ago.  Which makes it the third time I have dug up and relocated these darn ditch lilies.

We had to take a time out and relocate to safer ground when the big dead Ash came down.  And as expected, it exploded.

Could a tree fall any flatter?

Back to the lilies...

There were a lot of tops that will have to get burned later on.

We managed to save on decent looking Maple tree.  Because the surrounding Ash have been dead for quite a few years now, it was able to grow in a fairly nice, round shape.  It had four or five serious Poison Ivy vines in it, which we pulled off the best we could, and a Multi-Flora Rose up the whole height of it which was so massive it had gotten into a dead Ash next to it and actually held it up after it was cut.  It took three men to push the smaller tree out and a tractor to pull the vine down.

The finished area is looking very flat and barren.  There is still a day's worth of pick-em-up-sticks in there.  There are some very wide open areas now but I already have 10 nice bare roots Lilacs ready to go in and 9 other bare root shrubs on the way.  All of those are native and I am looking forward to arranging them in the bare spots so we can have some nice color and habitat for birds.  I think they will get a lot more sun exposure than I was expecting so they should do well.