When we bought our acre property, it was about a third wooded, with 60 \u2013 75 foot tall trees lining either side of it. I love trees, but a fully shaded lot doesn\u2019t make for good growing conditions. Some of them had to go.<\/p>\n

We got our friend Richard in who\u2019s handy with a chain saw and he got to work. At first I was on the side of the trees. I really didn\u2019t want any of them taken down. But then one day as I was at my desk writing a book I looked out my window and one of those 60 foot tall trees on the border of our yard just keeled over while I watched, missing one of our outbuildings by mere feet. I have never seen a tree fall over on it\u2019s own before, and as I pictured one of my kids or my husband under it when it went, I changed my mind about this tree-knocking-over business. Like a bunch of people had been trying to tell me, these are trees that should have been trimmed years ago \u2013 they\u2019re at the end of their lives and they\u2019re going to go one way or the other.<\/p>\n

As if to drive the point home, a few weeks later, another tree \u2013 a beautiful cedar near the house we meant to keep \u2013 split in two and the chunk that fell off missed our truck by inches. In the end we took out almost all of the side border trees, several in the middle of our property where the berry beds and orchard will go, and some off the back \u201cforest\u201d. That\u2019s a heck of a lot of trees. We\u2019ll replant the sides of our property with a cedar hedge to give us some privacy eventually. We kept a bit of the forest in the back (much to the disgust of my husband, but really \u2013 you have to have some trees!), and soon enough we\u2019ll have an entire orchard out back, so we\u2019ll get the rural feel back over a number of years.<\/p>\n

Once they were all down, we had to get to work chopping them up. My husband took over the chain-saw wielding. My youngest son is in charge of splitting logs. Thankfully, we were able to trade some cedar for the use of an electric splitter for a number of months. Otherwise my son would\u2019ve been out there for years. I\u2019m in charge of clipping up branches and hauling them into piles. The city banned us from burning those, so we ended up having to haul them away. We filled three containers to the top and we still have more.<\/p>\n

Like I said, we\u2019re still cutting, clipping, hauling and clearing, but we\u2019re making progress. Our poor, beat up, barren lot does not look its best but this is a long-term project. I can\u2019t wait to see where we\u2019re at five years from now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we bought our acre property, it was about a third wooded, with 60 \u2013 75 foot tall trees lining either side of it. I love trees, but a fully shaded lot doesn\u2019t make for good growing conditions. Some of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[330],"tags":[],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements","entry","has-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.lalaprojects.com\/coraseton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}