30 March 2012 - Pruning the fever

I'm sure everyone knows that nationwide, this has been an odd, really warm winter. Here in Utah, on December 30, I was out in the backyard with the mulching mower grinding up leaves for compost, after raking up all the fall leaves. Better yet, I was wearing a short sleeved t-shirt and that was enough to keep warm.

The rest of the winter was pretty much the same. Very little snow, very little cold. February was wonderful. Lots of warm weather, sun and blue skies. Even more so in March. By early March I was ready to plant flowers and pull weeds. I was getting twitchy with the need to get my fingers in the dirt. The head knows it is too early, but oh the heart. The heart wants spring.

So what do you do? You do the next best thing. You trim. Leaves are not yet out, the bones of the trees are exposed--get out the chain saws!


 Luckily for me, David has a chain saw on a stick. The stick is a 15 foot pole, so he can reach high up and cut where I point. It's great to have a brother with tools. Jack has a regular chain saw, and I have loppers and clippers.


The first tree on my list was a 50+ year old apple tree. It was extremely overgrown, suckers all the way through the tree, in some cases, the suckers were bigger than the branches. Not only that, it was growing straight up trying in vain to find light since it was surrounded by large trees.

We starting cutting and may have gone a little too far. We took it down to nothing but the big main  branches. Then we started on all the volunteers: elms, wild cherries and Russian olive trees planted by birds or the wind. At the end of the day we had a huge pile of limbs in the yard.



You can see the apple tree behind the pile. It looks like we pollarded it. Wait! We did.

While David was cutting the high stuff, Jack was cutting down another very old, dead apple tree.


We called to rent a green waste trailer, but there were so many limbs we thought we should cut them into smaller pieces to make sure everything fit. We spent the next week cutting the big pile into little piles. We worked on it every evening after I got off work. We only get the trailer for three days, so we had to be ready for it. And I was hoping we could get the entire pile in the trailer and add more.

I almost hated to see all these piles go. An unexpected benefit was the wild life that showed up. First the birds loved the big pile. Towhees and quail loved poking around the bottom and inside the pile. Juncos, chickadees and finches loved flitting around the top. The pile was so full of birds it looked alive.

After we chopped it up into all the little piles, the deer came in droves and chewed the tender ends. They would also pull branches out of the pile leaving us with yet another mess to clean up.


I admit, the deer have lost their novelty. The other night we had 15 deer munching their way through the yard. Too many!  Now I'm researching ways to keep them out of the yard. How on earth can I plant a garden or have flowers with this many deer? And about half of them are pregnant. Great.


 
  What you can't tell from the piles in the photo above is just how large some of the logs are.  Did I mention we were trying to tame a jungle?

Jack and I were loading up the last truckload of branches when we heard the chain saw going in the front yard. I looked up over the roof in time to see a huge branch from the flowering crab apple fall. You should have seen me scale the rock wall to get to the front yard.


I had mentioned to David that if we had enough room in the dumpster, there were a couple of trees in the front yard that I wanted trimmed or taken out.  He already had started on more trees and Jack and I were already tuckered out.

But a couple of hours later, we had all those chopped up as well. David had to stand on top of the bin and stomp everything down so we could get the bin covered.


Funny. We took so many trees out, and trimmed out so many others, I was worried about it might have been too much. But now that it is all cleaned up and gone, I only see how many more there are to trim and/or remove.