We have loved our pine tree-shaded back yard for a while now but every time a big storm came through, we worried that one of these massive behemoths would land right on our house. Justin found a wonderful tree service to come out and see what our options were. Surprisingly, we had trees that were 40-50 years old at least, making them very valuable for lumber. We had a grand total of 37 pine trees removed. Here is what it all looked like before. See the one on the far right, leaning directly toward our house. It was much scarier than that even when it was swaying during a storm.
To make it a bit easier on the tree service, Justin took down the back barbed wire fence between our property and Uncle Glynn’s small pasture. The tree guys were able to fall the trees into the pasture without damaging any of the fence. We were also able to hire a man with a backhoe to pile up all of the branches and limbs to be burned later.
Wyatt tried to help. If you’ve never pulled up fence posts or wound barbed wire, you don’t understand the torture! I had never worked on fencing before. Justin is an old pro thankfully and he put up with my whining about barbed wire for two whole days. That stuff isn’t fun at all! I couldn’t be a rancher unless I got a leather shirt or elbow-length leather gloves.
The ground was soggy so the lawn is messed up from the bull dozer tracks. Because of that, we opted to drag off some of the branches and stumps on our own with our four wheeler, a big chain, and the help of my dad’s tractor.
See how big those stumps are? We are going to let them rot for a while and then try to speed up the process with borax or some other stump rotting chemical. We checked into a stump grinder but those suckers are expensive! At $50 a tree we were looking at nearly $2,000!
Before and after: We kept the small trees and bushes but my back yard looks huge now!
There used to be a solid row of hedgy trees here that were easily 20 feet tall. Now we can sit on the back porches and see the cows when they meander into the pasture.
The plus side of the mess and mud was that May and Wyatt had a blast getting muddy and playing with the equipment!
