The Good News: I didn't cut my arm off

Welp, I survived another tree trimming season. Every spring I have to get out my chainsaw and take care of the jungle in our backyard and every year I am afraid of cutting off one of my own limbs. Last year while I was working in the backyard a neighbor two houses down was in his backyard using his chainsaw. I just happened to look over and see him cut off a branch and his later fall out from underneath him. I jumped up on one of the kids toys and yelled over to see if he was ok. I didn't hear an answer right away so I ran over to climb the fence when I saw his wife come out of the house and another guy who must have been with him frantically yell up to her to go get some towels. Now, any time someone is using a chain saw and there is an accident where someone yells "Go get a bunch of towels", that is not a good sign. Soon the paramedics arrived and he was taken to the emergency room. I never did find out what happened but the incident did nothing but confirm my fear for my chainsaw.

This year I just took care of some minor trimming myself and we hired a professional service to "lift the skirt", or whatever dirty metaphor it is called, on our 2 big maple trees. My goal is to be able to grow grass in our backyard. Right now all we have is dirt. you know the growing conditions are bad when even the weeds can't take root. If you remember, last year I planted grass and it came up nice until we got about 8 inches of rain in a month. It flooded the yard for too long and the grass died. Apparently swamp like conditions are not ideal for grass. This year I decided I would give it another try. I have a 2 fold approach. First, I realized that a raised garden bed along the back fence was working as a dam, so I removed the railroad ties and leveled the ground. Second, we trimmed the trees quit a bit yesterday morning and hopefully that will give the ground the sunlight that it needs.

It is amazing how hard it can be to recover just a small piece of land from years of neglect. It has taken us 3 Spring/Summers to finally have the backyard in what I would call respectable shape. Mostly it just needed A LOT of pruning and trimming. Even though I had already done a lot over the last 2 years, the entire ground was covered with branches when the trimmers were done. It took 2 of them at least 30 minutes just to load what they cut and the brush pile I already had onto their flatbed.

I hope to plant the grass in the next few days. I will keep you updated on the progress or lack thereof, but the weather doesn't look like it is going to make it easy for me.