What fun we had! Cutting and lopping and panting and puffing.

First we started removing all the branches that we could with the loppers in order to reduce the overall weight of the trees and to make room to get the saw in. I have plans for the cedar so I only cut it into manageable lengths rather than into short logs. My son might argue that my definition of manageable and his are somewhat different, but he was a real trooper and stayed with me right to the end.

You might notice that the tree is somewhat…larger…than we are. But I figured, even without a chainsaw, we could do it in oh…a few days or so. I had no idea my son would work so diligently. If there were a merit badge for perseverance, he would definitely have earned it. After we removed many of the smaller branches with the lopper, we still had to take the inch and a half to two inch branches off with the bow saw. The wood was green (okay red) so it wasn’t the easiest cut but it did go pretty smoothly, and we had most of the branches removed in about an hour.

Here’s a pic of us removing many of the branches near the base of the four trees.

Admittedly, they weren’t huge trees, only about as big around as our legs near the base, but when you only have a 24 inch long bow saw…they were big enough.  I realized after the trees were down that the roots were dead, and that there wouldn’t have been anything I could have done to save them…but you come explain that…I dare not try.

And one after we have most of the small branches removed.

Getting the stump out of the ground, even though most of the roots were dead, was the hardest part of all.  Teamwork, shovels, the lopper and a whole lot of grunting, eventually removed it, though we had to wait until Sunday when friends were over so that five of us could lift it and carry it into the woods.

 All that remains is the gaping maw that once held the roots…a reminder that I still have to fill in the hole, which incidentally is another thing my wife would like me to do.  In truth, she carted most of the branches away while my son and I carried the logs.  She also filled in much of the hole, though I’ll have to find dirt from elsewhere in the yard to fill it up the rest of the way.   This is now officially registered as project number 136 on my “Honey Do” list, which I put at around….June.  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Habitat for Humility, Life, The Multiverse, Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.