... there are now small forests:
Posts tagged 'willow'
Chunky
These should be hefty enough to take just about any birds that Nature shoves our way.
Condors, Bald Eagles, Albatrosses etc. should cope. Penguins might struggle with the upright bits.
Sayonara Salix babylonica
It was a sad day when we had to have the old willow taken out.
We would have liked to have kept it but it was becoming unruly and dangerous, the remains of the middle trunk which we'd had reduced during pollarding back in 2009 had rotted all the way down to ground level and were no longer binding the other three trunks, so the whole tree had to go with dignity instead of being trashed by a storm.
It was much older than anyone thought - before felling it, all opinions were that it was just a bit older than the house, so about 60 years old. When the trunks had been taken down I went to see the stump before they ground it out, even at 2ft high it was 4ft across. I tried to count the growth-rings but lost count at about 80, we now think it was into its 9th or maybe even its 10th decade.
We've saved a few wands to plant elsewhere in the garden, so it stands a chance of regenerating from those, but when the ground has settled we'll be planting a large native Birch in its place.
And the wood wasn't all wasted - we've propped up a couple of huge chunks of cut trunk and have hung bird-feeders on them, and we've used a couple of cut rounds to make a hefty Flintstones-style bird-table. Pics soon!
Anyway, here's a rough & ready time-lapse of its last few hours:
Tree fellers at work
Actually there were five of them.
You can't beat a time-worn old-fashioned Irish joke.
More to follow.
Crew-cut
A couple of weeks ago our large Salix babylonica decided to dump an eight-foot long by one-foot dia chunk of rotten wood on the lawn. For safety's sake we had to put the garden out-of-bounds for a while until the experts had had a look at the thing. They recommended pollarding to reduce the weight, remove any deadwood and reduce the "sail".
Yesterday their crew turned up to do the deed...
That's a serious bit of trimming, eh?
Reconditioned, runs like new
Our old knackered hut had given good service but was suffering from a tad (well, more like thirteen years) of neglect, as you can see in the following pic taken last autumn:
The offending shed, dwarfed by our Salix babylonica and by the bonfire-fuel.
Deadwood.
The roof was, er, partial, and had let in so much rain that the floor and bearers had rotted, but the T&G shiplap sides were mostly sound. The choice was simple - repair or replace. Well, I'm not one for wasting £400 of cash, so we went off to B&Q, discount card in hand, and raided their timber and board stocks. A week later, after a jet-wash and much sawing and screwing, the thing now lives a bit closer to the house and looks like this:
Revamped.
It's shrunk a bit - we had to trim 5" of rot off the bottom edge, and we shortened the length by 5" so that we could use 2400mm timbers and boards instead of having to buy and trim 10-footers. Now the floor and roof are better than they ever were when it was new, and it's been fully double-proofed inside and out.
Not bad, eh? And there's enough change from the budget to buy a few beers, which are well-deserved.
I reckon I'm getting the hang of this recycling malarkey.
