Chopping and lopping
I cut down the trees in the corner of the garden.
I felt that I’d invested in a bow saw, a lopper and an axe, so why should Andrew the arborist get all the fun.
I thought too that I must have the experience of cutting down trees just to know what it involved and to see if I was capable of doing it.
I had a week off work to celebrate one of my biggie birthdays and I had some other work to do in the garden so a half a day cutting down a tree shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience.
Two days later….
I’d nearly killed myself a couple of times, once a branch had got lodged between two others and I decided to pry it loose with another branch. Once the branch had started shifting I realised I had nowhere to run and it was falling in my general direction, so I turned stuck my bum in the air and luckily the branches broke the fall and it bounced off my bum.
I’d nearly destroyed a glass roofed outhouse next door. Luckily though after bouncing a large branch off next doors metal heating oil tank I peeped over the wall just to check I’d not killed anything to find a lean-to shed directly against the wall and in the arch of the branches I was just about to cut down. I nice robust wooden shed it was too, with a fully glass roof on it to boot, not good, but better to discover it now than after I’d cut down the next couple of branches. Anyway lots of gingerly cutting down of branches ensued and I roped in the services of the flex of a hand vacuum cleaner I’d found in the long grass to pull trees in the correct direction or to simply tie them to other branches so that they’d fall in a predetermined manner which sometimes worked.
I’d managed to produce a large pile of logs, not small logs but long logs and a very very large pile of twigs.
I’d discovered that cutting down trees was best left to the professionals though I would have happily tackled bigger trees with a chainsaw. However I had discovered that a bow saw does have its advantages in that one can hear things about to happen to a tree and that you’re not likely to cut off your arm with a bow saw.
So weighing up the trees around the drain that I needed to do, the disposal of the twigs and the logging of the pile of big logs into smaller logs I texted Andrew the arborist from Woodlands.
You know you offered to cut down those trees around the drain for £150
Yeah
Would you chop them down, dispose of a pile of twigs and log a pile of logs I’d made from cutting down a set of other trees for £180?
You cheeky ****er, ok I’ll do it, you don’t get anywhere without chancing do you?
And so I’m set to have my woody and thorny problems resolved.
Andrew is brilliant.