Thursday, May 3, 2018

Clearing the land...Part 1

We bought our new place at the end of February. We had a bunch of snow on the ground, so we really couldn't do much of anything. Although, Mother Nature was in a odd mood one day and it was in the 70's. That's when we started clearing the land in the front of the house.

This is what it looked like before we started the front of the house:


This is the tree line behind our rock wall, which needs to be fixed as well. If you look close, you can see little saplings between all the big trees. I didn't want them there.

There was also lots of thorny vines and poison ivy on one tree. I found out the hard way that poison ivy is still active even if it is dead or dormant. I had it on my pant line and my lower back. I had forgotten to take my gloves off and I pulled my pants up. Yup, that sucked!


This is the end of the tree line, near our nice neighbors. You can see an apple tree right in the middle. The hubby was trimming this tree over the summer, fell and broke his knee. He was out of work for like 4 months during the busy time, so paying bills sucked.

Oh, we are friends with one of the sisters that was selling our place. Matt was mowing the lawn for them and Steve was asked to help trim up some trees.


This tree fell down during a wind storm before we bought the place. Thank the Lord, it didn't hit the house! It landed in that pine tree and a lilac bush. It was our neighbors tree, so he felt really bad. It took out the phone line, but honestly, who uses landlines? We may be out in the country, but we only have cell phones.

Now that you see all the work that we had to do, here is what it looked like during the clearing:



Steve got a new Stihl chain saw, so before the hard tree removal, he decided to cur down a maple that was leaning over the driveway. I hated to see a maple getting cut, but we have a bunch more.


Steve got his revenge with the apple tree. It was in a bad spot in the yard, so it had to go. We have two or three very overgrown apple trees out back. We are thinking of planting Mac and Cortland trees anyway. We aren't sure what the tree are out back either. I did save most of the logs from this tree. I want to use the wood in my smoker. Yum, apple wood smoked meat!


Matt cleaning up the mess from the apple tree coming down, It landed on one of the benches for our picnic table, so that broke. He thought it was funny watching Steve take this thing down.



This is the tree that fell being cut up. You can see the pole that our electric meter is attached to. The tree also took down the cable line, but the cable guy just put up a new one instead. You can see the phone line that stretched across.


Still cutting up the tree. We gave all this wood to a friend of ours, who happened to be our realtor. She will use it next year to heat her house. Nothing went to waste while cleaning up this yard.




Here is part of the front tree line cleared of little saplings and vines. I will be raking up all the leaves and put them into a compost pile. Lots of them are starting to break down big time. The dirt under the leaves is very nice dark dirt. The rest of the yard is sandy, ugly brown soil.

Next post will be the before of the back yard. Lots of changes happened there.

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