Logging the Back .40

Note the decimal placement. Not the “back forty.” The back “point-4-0.” As in .40 of an acre. Really, it’s half an acre, but “logging the back .40” sounds better.

We live on a double lot. It wasn’t always a double lot. In fact, when we bought our house twenty years ago, the property was .40 of an acre. My Liege, although trained as a professional forester, was, um, “blessed” with a businessman’s mind. So it always bothered him that our property was just shy of the ability to subdivide it. After about ten years, our family’s needs grew too large for the house. We looked around, but couldn’t find another neighborhood that suited us. So we built an addition. The day we began excavating (literally, THE DAY), the daughter of our elderly neighbor asked if we wanted to buy the elderly neighbor’s house. The DH was all over this. It was a huge financial challenge to buy the neighbor’s house while building an addition on our present house. Especially because the housing market tanked, and after changing the property lines to get enough extra area to take off a lot between the two houses, we couldn’t sell the neighbor’s house for the same price we bought it at. It sat empty for several months, then we finally began renting it out. Wonderful renters, too. But the house was only two bedrooms with one bathroom, so when the wife became PG with their third child, they had to move. We put the house on the market again. It didn’t sell. Then I decided to sell it myself. Don’t ask me why it sold then. Clearly, I’m uber-talented. But we got our asking price, the same price we’d bought the house at (yes, we put some work into it, too).

The biggest challenge to fell. Only a few green branches remained on this monster. The rest was as dead as the top. Note the power line. I was on the road directing traffic (essentially, swinging my arms about and jumping up and down, yelling, "Don't come any closer!")

Naturally, a year later, the housing market began climbing again and before we knew it the house was worth twice what we sold it for. That’s real estate for you. You do what you can at the time and don’t look backward.

Long story not really shortened, we’re still living in our first house (with an addition) that we bought twenty years ago and our back yard looks reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally big. But it’s actually a second lot.

Two other dead trees came down before my father tackled this one (same tree as above photo). It had grown into a dangerous angle leaning into the road.

I could go into a lengthy description of the number of trees surrounding our house twenty years ago, but it’s a pretty huge description, including an exhaustive number of Dutch elm trees that were supposed to be a hedge but the old people we bought the house from had given up and let them grow into trees. We turned them back into a hedge, realized it needed cutting every three weeks, so cut the hedge to stumps following a bad car accident that left us incapable of trimming the hedge every three weeks at the time. The next spring, A MILLION irises, lilies, tulips, daffodils, and the like sprung up in place of the hedge. I swear, I did not plant a single one. The thickness of the hedge had prevented them from blooming.

Over the years, we’ve cut down trees here and there. Two so we could add on a sundeck, two so we could add on a mud room. One because our toddler was allergic to it (birch). One because it was infested with Dutch elm disease and we learned the black bugs that had filtered down our fireplace were also getting into our neighbors’ houses. Plus, the row of evergreens between our house and the neighbor’s house slowly turned into a wood pile, because it looked weird to have our new 1/2 acre yard cut at the 9/10th mark by a row of old, skinny, scraggly trees (we kept a copse for the quail and pheasants and deer to play in/chew on).

We have a fireplace, so anything we’ve cut has been used to heat the house. A couple of weeks ago, my dad came over (retired logger), and he, My Liege, and Eldest Son went to work again. Whoever planted eight trillion Engleman spruces in our yard forty or fifty years ago must not have realized that they aren’t the prettiest trees in the world. Plus, they planted them too close together. So they grew very tall and skinny, and over the years several died—or became nearly dead. Which is dangerous. Especially when a stiff breeze might cause one of them to crash into our house or take out the power lines. This year we needed to take out the danger trees. There were 7 of them. Three skinny ones, three big ones, and one middle one. We still have five maples, an oak, another deciduous tree I love but couldn’t name, another smaller deciduous tree I love but also can’t name, a lilac bush that grew into a tree, and a heckuva lot more Engleman spruce that are still healthy.
Old Logger, a.k.a my dad, bucking off limbs that we stacked up so the chipper could come and chew them up. The remaining logs are slowly turning into next year's firewood.

For two-three weeks, our yard was a mess, while we waited for the chipper to arrive.

View of yard where 3 of the danger trees stood, after the chipping guys took away the debris. My maples are shedding leaves, so now we have to rake them and take them to my mom's compost so they can rot into fertilizer for her massive gardens next year.

I know some people will hate that we cut down ANY trees. But people who live in wood-framed houses and have wood floors and furniture made of wood and don’t recycle their computer paper really shouldn’t throw stones. 😉