I know, all we seem to do is play in the garden and climb trees when we should be working on the house. Well it was just too nice a day to stay in doors, a toasty -5°C/23°F (luckily no wind chill) and the sun was shining. We’re pruning the trees to thin the canopy, remove dead wood and remove some of the branches which overhang the lawn. We are being careful in what we remove as we don’t want to spoil the visual aspect of the trees and after we have finished you probably won’t notice that they have been cut at all. I won’t seal the cuts as it seems that trees can look after themselves.
Currently I’m just taking off some of the main branches, leaving 3 – 4 foot stumps on the tree which I’ll trim flush with the main trunk at a later date. The reason I’m leaving long stumps is that when a branch breaks, it can cause tear out, which you can see was what happened in the video below and I don’t want that to happen to the main tree. As for the stumps, I’ll cut them off in shorter lengths, 1 – 2 foot so I can control the wood as it starts to fall. When I was cutting this branch (and it was pretty big) you could hear it going and I didn’t want to be up there when it went. I’m lucky I did go down as that could have been messy as it hit the ladder on it’s descent and the branch went quick.
Still using the trusting Bahco bow saw, but starting to feel that I could do with a powered chainsaw, not sure if I’d buy an electric corded or a gas/petrol one. I’m not looking for a super powerful behemoth of a chainsaw, rather something small and lightweight. We used to have a corded Black and Decker one in the UK which worked great for anything less than about 9″ in diameter. By the way I think this is the first time I have ever used the word behemoth in any written form and if you’re interested it’s origins are:
Behemoth comes from the Hebrew word b’hemah meaning beast.
I also found out that I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly, shame on me. By the way we did buy a larger Bahco bow saw, however we’ve lost it so if either of us have left it at your house, can we have it back please?
Lastly the stones at the base of the tree aren’t grave stones but they could be, but that’s another story …