Controlled Carnage

The view from a couple years ago.

With the first hints that Winter may be drawing to a close and Spring will soon be upon us a young girl’s fancy turns to… gardening!  With that in mind last week I hired my pal Bob to come and fell a bunch of trees surrounding the old log barn.  The barn did not care, but the trees had become so dense and tall that they were shading a small garden plot Mrs. Barn has been cultivating for a few years, including some small pear trees, right next to the garden shed behind the stone wall.  The trees have not flourished as she had hoped primarily because the the limited direct sunlight in that spot.

So, the trees had to suffer mortal wounds.  Only three or four of the trees were very large as these things go, perhaps a foot or so at the base, but even that tree weighs a couple tons and could really ruin a day.   Plus a number of the smaller trees, 6-8 inches at the base, were sorta leaning the wrong way for me to drop them easily and in the right direction.  that’s where Bob comes in, having been a woodsman much of his life he really knows how to “read’ a tree and get it to go where he wants it to go.   even then we had to “push over” several of the trees once he could to a critical point in the cutting.  On tree immediately behind the barn was too large and leaning too much for us to get this time, I’ll have to hook up a winch to pull it in the right direction when we cut it in the future.

But for now we have a whole lot of new sunshine coming through, and nearly a full winter of firewood on the ground.