The end of the elms

Wednesday: These are the two elms that died from Dutch Elm Disease. It's time for them to come down so one of our neighbours down the road, who would like the wood for their wood stove, offered to cut them down for us in exchange for the wood. That's a good deal for us, as the quotes we got from the urban forestry people ranged from $300-600 dollars. So this is the 'before' photo.

We have a little forest on the other side of our property, and there are several dead trees in there too. I marked them with orange surveyors tape, and hopefully we can get those cut down too.

The first tree had a slight lean towards the garage, so we tied a trowel to the end of a rope and threw it up into the crotch of the tree (at bottom right of the photo). We pulled on the rope, as the last cut was being made in the tree trunk, to make sure the tree would fall away from the driveway. Unfortunately, the handle of the trowel broke as we were pulling on the rope. Fortunately the tree fell away from the garage, so no problems. This photo shows Steve cutting off the little branches prior to cutting the branches up into logs. Steve cut the tree into logs and we loaded it into the truck.

It was getting dark, so this was the last photo that turned out. I was surprised to see the long leader branches up and off to the right in this photo. Since this is the direction of the prevailing wind, I wonder if the wind made the branches form this way?? Most of this second tree was leaning towards the right, over the lawn, but we wanted the tree to fall beside the driveway. So we tied the rope around a high branch and pulled on it as it was being cut. Again, the rope came loose. This time we were able to stop cutting the tree and refasten the rope, and then everything went as planned.

As it was dark -- and raining -- after this, we stopped and had supper. Yummy beef stew!!


Thursday: I took this photo a short while ago. As you can see, it is very foggy and rainy. What you can't see is that it is chilly. We have nice weather forecast for Saturday, between 12 and 17C (depending on which forecast you listen to), so that will probably be the day that I can finish painting the front door and the tree can finish getting cut up.