Now, I love trees.  And we have a lot of them.  One day last summer, I started to count all the decent sized trees and I stopped around 50!  But we had three trouble makers on the estate and I just wasn’t sure how we would be able to deal with them.  A year ago I had estimates to remove them and it was well over two grand.  One in particular, this dead ash, was very troubling.  It was crammed right next to the garage and just not in a good place at all.  Everyone was worried it would take out the side of the garage, or just wreck havoc when it fell.

Well, along come my wonderful neighbors!  They have a relative who cuts trees if he can keep the lumber for firewood sales.  I’m like, oh yeah!  Sure!!!!   So today, they came with pickup truck, cables, saws and a few extra hands to make quick work of these three babies.

The ash came down pretty smoothly.  One limb did knock a small hole in the roof, which being tin and about a hundred years old, wasn’t a huge issue.  A little patch and we’ll be good as new!  It did manage to break not one, but TWO cables tied to a BIG truck that was pulling on that monster to keep it falling into the middle yard and not into the driveway!  (Yes, we did move Blue and Jr.’s truck Big Red…  haha.. just in case!!!

It’s a little hard to see, but the tree on the left was a real bugger too.  It had been uprooted in a storm, but not completely.  So it was leaning 45 degrees into the canopy of my English walnut tree!  A much desired beast in the yard.  And it was going to fall on one of the pretty crabapple trees, sure enough.  It was still growing, though, a testament to tree determination!  But, you could push on it and it was sway so easily, it was just a danger.  If it came down in a storm, it might be very dangerous to livestock or US!  So it had to go.

The pine on the right was dying.  Half the tree had died, all the way up.  It was weirdly scrawny, and well, the easiest to take down, so I thought, why not ask?  And they said sure, that would be easy to bring down.  Might as well get all my problem trees gone in one fell swoop!

They decided to take this one above the roof line, to hopefully save it from kicking back and taking out the whole side garage wall!  Yes!   Thank you!   I think they are going to take more of it down, to about 4 foot or so.  I want to put in a gate back here so that when I occasionally need or want to bring a truck or car back in the middle, or say to the back barn with a load of hay, we can.  Since this giant old tree will be a GREAT gate post… why not use it?

One of the plans it so use this little shed, behind the garage as Cody’s fancy new stable.  Since the sheep have taken over the pony barn, he has been sharing his room with 7 little annoying dwarves.  I would like to have him up closer to the house, especially when it floods…  and this little shed would be perfect.  It’s got this cute little window in the back for light and air, and the front part opens into our courtyard.   I can just see him in there, with a little cute Dutch door, cut of course to his size, munching his hay in his new insulated and paneled nice stable box stall.  It’s a nice big space, 8 foot by 14 foot.  Perfect!!!

(The sheep can always be housed in the big barn if it were to flood.  But right now they are TERRIFIED to go into the big barn because that is where the terrible hair cutting event took place and I couldn’t lure them in there to save my life.  They love to go in Cody’s barn because I guess, it’s like hanging out in your cool brother’s room.  So we figured, why fight it, and to be honest, it’s a great space for them, 20 foot by 20 foot…  way too much space for just Cody.  He’ll be warmer in his stable and much closer to the house and all.  He will like that.  He loves to be in the center of the action.)

What really amazed me is how quickly they worked.  Within an hour, all three trees were down and being limbed up.  In fact, they left to return in the morning to cut them all up into firewood chunks, and later this evening, Jr. came down and had them all finished and limbed up in no time.  He brought his boys down to haul the bigger branches back out to our hedge row that we’re building up on the perimeter of the property, so that was fantastic!  How many times must we say how THANKFUL, GRATEFUL and BLESSED we are to have such wonderful friends and neighbors!  I felt like my feeble offering of a pound cake was truly not enough!!!   (It was good pound cake though… haha…. a cream cheese butter pound cake recipe that I tried today and was absolutely fantastic…. will post here in a bit…)  Still….   I am very certain that we ended up on the sweet end of this deal.  I’m just so happy to have the two trouble makers down…  one less thing to worry about!!!  Every time we got a big storm, that one pine would wobble and sway SO MUCH…  I knew it had to come down!!!

It always amazes me just how BIG a tree is when it is laying on the ground.  They are massive!  I was hoping to get a couple posts out of this one, but it’s all knotty and twisty and we just couldn’t get too many out.  That’s okay, it was just one of those hopeful things!  Haha… we need 6 good posts for our pig yard!   I don’t want any escaped hoggies!

The sheep were so funny…  after the all clear and the fences were back up… they had to take down a section to get the truck in the middle (hence my want for a gate at some point…)  well, those sheep decided that they would nibble all the downed trees and proceeded to sample the pine and the broken crab apple branches that the leaning pine took out.  They had a ball, just nibbling and nibbling!  We didn’t want them to get sick, so they got a little taste treat and then we shooed them away.  Sheep have delicate tummies and you don’t want them pigging out on new foods.  But they do get leaves and such from the hedges and all, so I figured a little grazing time would be fine.  They were SO tiny in around the huge trees!  They really are midget sheep…

All in all, a great experience and a big massive to do card off the stack!  And a huge worry off my mind!  Tomorrow morning, they are going to be cutting up the bulk of the wood and then we’ll just be left with a bunch of firewood sticks!  Sounds good to me!

We’re heading tomorrow early afternoon to a poultry swap and sale!!!  HOW COOL IS THAT?  I can’t wait to see what they have.  We are hoping to find turkey poults at a reasonable price!  Maggie wants to raise them this year for the table and for sales, and if she can get them as a good price, she will stand to make a decent return on her time.  Around here a good sized heritage hen will go for $35-$40 and a Tom easily $50-$60.  She wants to raise at least 20.  Some for us and for family and the rest to sell to her customers.  She’s got her birthday seed money and I think she’ll do fine if she can get her poults for around $4 or $5 a piece.  We might end up getting most of them at the livestock auction, but we are hoping that she can get some tomorrow!  Since the brooders are empty now, she’s got the room to get them started!

Just another busy day at the homestead!   We even did our Cinco de Mayo lawn mowing!!!  Yep, Jr. fixed our mower so that we can now start it ourselves… (wimpy girls you know…)  and Jessy and I did tag team mowing all across the front yards and the front western pasture.  Oh, how I can’t wait to get you fenced in, western pasture…  I hate mowing down FEED…  haha….  the sheep and the pony would LOVE to be out there eating that lush green grass filled with wild carrot and clover…  but alas, it’s too close to the road without a fence.  I’ve taken Cody up there on a lead to graze but it’s just not the same as leaving the herd out there for a day or three to totally clean it up.  Soon… soooon…..  first the back pasture.  Then the front…

 

 

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