An Easier Way ?

(post by  Jason) Every year it seems like we have one or two trees that decide to die in places where it would either be extremely unfriendly or downright dangerous for me to remove them. When this happens we usually call someone in who specializes in dangerous tree removals and pay them to get the trees down. Often they accomplish this by climbing the tree(s), but the last couple years we have used a guy with a bucket truck which works equally well and is probably considerably safer.

What we have never done is have them do anything with the trees once they are on the ground. When both of our big tractors have front end loaders on them it is easy to cut them into lengths and pile them up, ready to burn as soon as they dry out. But it is a kind of a pain in the rear and it still involves handling the trees multiple times after they are on the ground. This year we had a 50 foot tall catalpa tree that leans directly over the electric company's transformer taken out, and we had them cut back a lot of the limbs that had grown through the fences at Melissa's mom's farm to make it easier to repaint those sections of the fence. At the suggestion of our dangerous tree removal expert we tried chipping the limbs this year. What a revelation ! No mess. No burn pile to dry out for the next year before it can be set alight. And lots of mulch....exactly what the doctor ordered in this part of the world. Can it be we actually found an easier way to do something, instead of the hard way ?

Of course all of you out there who know me already know where this is going. I have already spent considerable time on TractorHouse looking at various sorts of industrial strength chippers. I am trying pretty hard to justify the cost to myself right now ! I wonder how much time it would take to chip every tree on the farm down into sawdust ? Might not be very pretty to look at, and it sure wouldn't please Melissa, but there would be a lot less stuff to fool with every time the wind got up.

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