The Hard Part

Regular readers know that I love tipping over trees; that's the fun part. After you have a tree on the ground, the hard part begins. Before we had a hydraulic splitter I loaded some pretty hefty chunks in the trailer for splitting at the house. Now we can park the splitter right next to the tree and make little ones out of big ones pretty fast; that makes processing much more tolerable. The worst part of the chainsaw business to me is cleaning up the sticks. Out in the woods you can just leave them lay, but in the yard the tree top has to be worked down, loaded up, and hauled out. We try to delay jobs like this one until late fall when the grass has quit growing. If you do one of these in the summer you have to put on a big push to do the cleanup, then smooth out the holes before the grass gets away from you.