Pruning My Garden

Saturday was a day to get all of the neglected stuff done around the yard. That translates out as the tree line. Our house is surrounded by trees. It's really nice, because for most of the spring and fall, and all of the summer, we can't see the houses to either side of ours. We live in this little isolated country whose borders are made up of maple, elm, birch, oak, and spruce, along with forsythia and raspberry bushes and ivy. Trouble is, it all got overgrown. The old guy who owned the house had died about five years ago, and nobody's taken care of it since then, plus he wasn't really able to do much himself the last few years. Needless to say, the treeline is impenetrable now, choked out by maple and birch saplings and runaway blackberry canes and this nasty invasive vine that climbs up trees and chokes the life out of them. It was time to thin it out.

Saturday morning I attacked the treeline with a weed eater, a pair of hedge shears and a hand saw. I whacked and cut and sawed and pulled and managed to clear out about a thirty foot swath of it. In about three hours. Now, I can actually see to edge of my property line. My yard expanded by 10 to 15 feet. It took its toll on me though. Lost a couple of gallons of body fluid through sweat. Scraped up my knuckles. Gouged my shin. Wrenched my back. But it was worth it. I cleared it out. Then, yesterday at church, my friend tells me he has a large, industrial-type weed eater with a saw blade on it instead of nylon string. He says it'll take down a 3" diameter tree. I'm borrowing it this Saturday.

Saturday afternoon I built a picnic table. Nothing fancy. Just 2x6 pressure treated lumber. Standard old fashioned picnic table. But I like it for its simplicity. And it goes well with our house. Next I need to put the railing on the tree house. That comes this week. Of course, what I'm not doing while I'm busy doing all of this yard stuff is working on my novel. Call it avoidance if you want to. Or maybe I'm just letting my brain rest a while. Either way, the work did me good. When I do that kind of hard work, it loosens up my mind. Gets the cobwebs out the there. Ideas start to flow. Later, I can write more, better. Work is therapy. Working the body stimulates the brain. Plus the yard looks better.