On the day after the limb fell, crews turned up with the wood-chipper and a cherry picker, to ‘take the weight off’. They proceeded to trim one side of the tree – drastically. We lugged in the logs, to dry for next winter, only leaving a couple of huge ones. Mr R’s puny chainsaw couldn’t cope with them. We got a small saw earlier in the year, just for cleaning up the yard, having no intentions of gathering our own wood in the forest ever again. Getting too old for that!

Our town is surrounded by forests, with a section or two designated for wood collection each year One pays a fee per metre of wood, and can only collect wood already felled by the forestry blokes during thinning. These days, even collecting fallen timber from roadsides incurs a fee – and they wonder why bushfires are more dangerous now!

The laws have changed, too, you can now only collect green wood, you have to store and dry it yourself and must collect your whole supply over a small timeframe. We started buying our wood when Rob’s eye started playing up. Not safe using a chainsaw if you are in pain and cannot see properly, so I played up my back pain a bit to talk him into paying for lovely split wood deliveries!

Ahh, I’ve digressed. This morning everyone is back and the bright orange witches hats are out, chainsaw buzzing, and thumps as the logs hit the ground.  I hope they don’t drop anything on the house! It’s marvellous, the size of the wood they can feed into those chippers.

Remember this tree from the other day – the one with the pretty catkins? Well, I feel a real dill – it is an oak tree. I swear I have never seen these catkins before, even though I have lived here over twenty years. After all, I only started walking down that way since January. 😀

The snowball tree buds are gorgeous, like little xmas decorations! [By the way, I made up that name. It might not be a snowball tree at all!]

The street light was hooked back up to the powerline after 9pm last night. It was weird having it pitch black out front. Since it is an intersection it’s one of those orange ones.

Bad news, the elm tree has to be taken down to the stump, since it has both rot and termites.  On the positive side, this means our house will warm up more in summer – but that is a good thing, as we usually leave our windows open during warm days to warm the house up, even in summer. And light, we will have so much more light – we noticed that with every branch that has fallen. Three now, in less than a year with another looking a bit shaky.

January

Back in January I moaned about a split elm tree in front of our place.  A branch had fallen in December and another in January, but the Bendigo Parks and Trees bloke assured me it would be right until it had the dead wood removed – it is in the queue.

Double occupancy?

I’ve watched the split get a little bigger since then, and only last night when I drove under, I remarked to Mr R that I was sure the split was getting longer. The only reason I haven’t moaned to the shire about it, is because the birds are nesting in it.

This afternoon, the limb in question finally gave way and fell, taking the limb under it, too. We heard the thump, but it is quite windy and one of our trees is banging on the house.  You would think something that big would have been louder! It looks like termite mud there, where it parted: but then it could just be rot where the water gets in.

It turns out the power line that came down is only a feeder line to the street light, so isn’t live until it turns on by remote control.

The policeman is still sitting in his car out there, waiting for Powercor to turn up to take care of it. The local shire tree crew (one man)  and the State Emergency Service volunteers have been and cleared the road. It started raining about that time and I saw them casting anxious looks up the tree in case anything else came down.

Now I can stop feeling bad because I have never taken the time to speak to the bus-driver about pulling the school bus up right there. After all, I had been told it had been ‘looked at’.  I’m thankful no-one was injured.