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Started by slink, May 29, 2014, 01:28:22 PM

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slink

Today we had three moribund pin oaks removed.  Just in case anyone is curious, here is an almost complete mass-balance.  It lacks only about a dozen straight 6"-diameter branches that one of the workers took home for a project of his.

The three oaks before:

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The pile of chips from chipping everything chippable:

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The logs from the trunks:

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The sawdust from the stumps:

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salamander

It's surprising what something as impressive as a tree turns into when taken down to bare particles, even without the trunks being included.

That looks like a beautiful area where you live, despite being down three oaks.  :)

solarscreen

Finished product looks clean and open but still bracketed nicely!

Thanks for sharing!
Technology - Home Theater - Astronomy - Pyrotechnics

slink

I hope in a few days to be able to post a picture of the two new large-leafed lindens that are going to replace the three oaks.  And I'm making an effort to save the three oaks on the other side of the driveway.  One of them is a pale green, but still has all of its leaves.  The leaves on the other two are darker green, but not dark enough.  Yesterday I sprinkled iron sulfate around their drip lines and watered that in.

In July we're getting some new toys, including a new tractor with a front-end loader and a 5'-wide tiller.  We can use the new tiller to smooth out the lawn, and the front-end loader to distribute the chips around the trees along the driveway.  The sawdust will probably end up mostly around the lindens, with some of it worked into the ground.  The smoothing might have to wait until we get the driveway repaired, though.  I keep forgetting that project.  My husband says the snowblower is catching on the cracks in the concrete.  I'd be happy to let the driveway go to pieces, but the snowblower has to work so the driveway will have to be repaired.  I'm the one who hired the driveway poured, twenty-two years ago, so it's my own fault we have one to repair.

slink

Weeha!  I got to mow with the new tractor today, using the 5-foot finish mower.  I felt incredibly empowered.  My husband is out there tidying up with the riding mower.  There are some places in our yard where you can't take a 5-foot wide tractor, and also it weighs too much to mow over the plastic lids on the septic tank.

I don't know why I did so badly with the brush cutter on the first day.  Maybe the ground was too wet where I tried to cut, on that day.  I ran the finish mower over the same area today and everything went fine.  Or maybe watching three hours of NCIS:Los Angeles before mowing got me hyped up.   ;D

rkelly17

@slink, I got to drive a tractor once in my life, and it was a thrill. When I was a young pastor the congregation owned about five acres of vacant land. In LA either you have to knock down the weeds and brush on vacant land or the city does it for you and charges you quite a bit. The congregational council decided that they could rent a tractor and disc (what you run over a field after plowing, I'm told) and do it themselves for way less money. They all worked in aerospace, but had grown up on farms in the Midwest. So one Saturday we went to the large equipment rental and rented a tractor and disc. One of them drove it from the rental place about 2 miles to the church and they started taking turns roaring around the vacant field. Some of them were quite skilled at it. Then they decided they should let the city-boy pastor take a turn. I actually made it around the field twice without breaking anything! A good time was had by all.

slink

@rkelly17: We had a Ford 8N tractor before, which only had one functional speed forward and one speed at all backward, and both were too fast for me.  I think, in retrospect, that the main difference between today and the first time that I tried our new tractor is that I was in low gear today instead of in medium gear.  I had time to think about everything, today.

We had a disk harrow but traded it in on the new tractor.  We bought it to break sod, which it wouldn't do, as I know that you know by your description of it.  It is intended to more or less rake the loose dirt level after plowing a field.  I didn't know that when I bought it.  It sure looked fierce!   :D  I am surprised though that your group didn't rent a brush cutter instead of a disk.

rkelly17

@slink, I don't know what the rules are in the City of LA these days vs. what they were in the early 70s, but the whole "discing down the weeds" thing is about fire prevention (as per recent wild fires in So. Cal.). The idea was to knock it down to bare dirt, not cut it. After we moved to So. Ontario (which looks a lot like your pictures of your property) I've had to get used to a place where the grass doesn't die in April. In fact, this year, there was still snow on the ground in April! The grass hadn't even started growing yet. I was always more used to hills of brown grass dotted with occasional live oaks extending to the horizon or mountains covered with chaparral. Not to mention the desert.

slink

Ah, that explains it.  No loss if the soil blows away, because it's a desert anyway.  *grin*

We also had snow in April.  I'm in Iowa, on land cut from the margins of the better farming land.  Across the road from us, for instance, there is the typical corn, soybeans (called "beans"), hay rotation type of farm.  A little ways down the road is a beef cattle farmer who also grows some crops but mostly has ponds and pastures.  I am beginning to suspect that some of my grass-fed beef comes from his farm, but I don't know that for sure.  He has grown some corn in the past, and feeding corn isn't allowed for the cattle whose meat I buy.  I can't easily see his farm from my frontage so it is all guesswork.  My side of the road is more houses, all on acreages.  We have 20 acres and two ponds which used to be stocked but might be in pretty poor shape after the past few years of low rainfall.  We had a couple of friends who fished in it regularly but they haven't been around lately so I have no idea how the ponds are.  I used to fish but my husband doesn't like fish, and I don't fish for sport.  I fish to get fish to eat.  The fish in the pond taste pretty fishy, but I liked them boiled with Raman noodles.  I'm lucky to get him to eat salmon.  Eating black crappie is out of the question.

rkelly17

Won't eat Black Crappie? Oh dear. My wife is not a fish person, but she would eat crappie before she would eat salmon.  In my family growing up annual vacations meant going someplace to fish for two weeks and eating pretty much all fish that we caught. Whether it was a Southern California beach or a mountain lake, it always involved fishing. Even the year we went to Boise to visit my aunt we got some fishing in. Now we take the grandkids to Stoney Lake in the Kawartha section of central Ontario for a week of fishing every year. My Grandson is a true descendant of his Great-Grandfather--catch and release is a totally impossible concept. Catch and eat. If we lived on a property with two ponds he would be in heaven and we would be eating way more fish than we do.

slink

To give him his due, he will eat fish now if I serve it to him infrequently and in a casserole.  He eats it much more slowly than anything else I serve to him, but he does eat it.  When I first met him, he wouldn't eat any fish at all.  It was something to do with a fishing boat trip when he was a child.  He got seasick and the smell of fish was wrapped into that memory.  Eating shellfish made him throw up when we first met, and he thought he was allergic to those.  He can eat scallops now without any problem, and it is possibly because I haven't pointed out to him that scallops are a shellfish.  These are genuine scallops, not punched shark meat.  He is eating these things now because, ever since he retired, there is no meal that I can eat something different from him.  I don't make two dinners, so it was either deprive me or make him step out of his comfort zone.

The only food I lost on completely was eggplant.  He has no idea why he can't stand eggplant, but after the time I saw him look into a stew and see pieces of eggplant, and visibly shudder, I never served it again.  It's a shame, because the flowers are so beautiful.  I confess I have had some vague notions of making eggplant with a spicy tofu recipe to see if he will eat it that way without shuddering, but I haven't tried that yet.  He gives me a flat stare every time he sees me contemplating buying an eggplant, so I will have to plant eggplant seeds in our new garden.  At least he won't yank out the plants, the way my landlady's hired man did when I was in graduate school.  Eggplants and anemones that man seemed to hate with a passion.  He pulled the anemones out of my garden, in full bloom, and the eggplants while they were bearing fruit.  I found them in the trash can and I waxed wroth, for what good that did me.  *laugh*

rkelly17

I have to admit, I was not a huge eggplant person until I was introduced to Greek and Middle Eastern food. We have a Lebanese and an Egyptian restaurant here that both do an unbelievable baba ganoush (sp???). That converted me. I'm not sure where I would be without the ethnic places that have sprouted up in our area. When we moved here in 1985 cuisine ran all the way from Pennsylvania Dutch/Mennonite to German (pretty much the same thing, really). Don't get me wrong. I'd sell my soul for a really good bratwurst on a German bun, but thank God Canada was taking in a lot of "nomads" in the 80s and 90s and our community received many. It raised the diversity of local cuisine by about 1000%.

slink

I grew up in Chicago.  Actually in it, not in a suburb of it.  There was a Greek restaurant nearby the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, which served retsina in little plastic cups to underage students who were waiting in line to enter.  They had whole lamb carcasses hanging behind the counter, and flies inside even in the wintertime.  They paid off the police, right at the cash register and in front of everyone.  My mother and I loved that place.  Most of the waiters in that restaurant did not speak English.  We ordered by pointing at what we wanted, on the menu, because we didn't speak Greek.  One time we heard the head waiter chewing out one of the other waiters, in Greek, and we giggled because of the look on the waiter's face.  The head waiter thought we had understood what he said, and gave us a free round of ouzo with great apologies.  He must have said something really awful.  I loved the moussaka they served there.  As well as their disdain for the liquor laws, of course.   ;D


solarscreen

Ok, that's enough of the talk about Greek food! ;)  Now I'm hungry and I need to find some good Baklava.

Making the pastry layers for baklava is just crazy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJKvAIgPAtk



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rkelly17

What? You mean landscaping ISN'T about eating? Oh dear.