You fellows have been busy this year so far.
We got hit by the southern edge of a big ice storm earlier this week. It was beautiful and devastating.
We had numerous branches down or broken and still hanging in the trees as well as a number of uprooted trees. Many of the trees are evergreen down here, and the weight from over half an inch of freezing rain was just too much.
Our first priority today was to get this broken oak limb (still hanging by a hinge) off our old pergola (we had to take the roof off a couple of years ago after the 2021 snow storms). It was still hanging by a sapwood hinge. I’m sorry for the bad picture. I took it from a child’s bedroom window when it was still too dangerous to venture out under the trees. Oak wilt is spreading fast in our area, and this is the time of year that disease-carrying beetles start to fly, so we needed to attend to the wounded tree (and we didn’t want the danger of a hanging branch in our back yard.)
Pretty amazingly we were able to use our 8 inch electric pole saw to cut it down carefully. We were able to work at a safer distance and the pergola sustained no further damage. Once we got the branch down and the area cleared, we wanted to take the remains of an older branch that had broken off on the other side five years ago. Once we cut into that, however, we discovered that the whole main trunk was rotting out, and we felt that we had no choice but to take the whole tree.
My little pole saw did all the branch work. A sixteen inch electric saw did a little bit of the main trunk, but my husband finished it off with the 20 inch bar on the gas-powered chainsaw for the last couple of cuts. The trunk was just over two feet in diameter.
After that job, we headed to a strip of land that’s our property but had trees that fell over into the neighbor’s yard. While my husband worked on the two uprooted cedars, I used the pole saw (the neighbors kindly let us use their outlet for it) to take down broken branches on five different trees. We hauled a lot away from the area but couldn’t quite finish it all.
It was a good start on the cleanup, but there’s a lot more of the same still to do. Thankfully we addressed the most urgent/dangerous stuff today, so mostly there aren’t too many branches still hanging in the air.
My husband has already arranged a day off of work on Monday so that he can haul and lop branches and perhaps start running them through the chipper.
