There are five new photographs on the Photo page, starting from number eleven.
These pinks fill my garden every summer with perfume. They really do have the most beautiful smell. Elsie.
This is one of the Eden Project Robins. They have taken up residence in the domes!Lindsay.
Screen shots of Hazel and Valentine. FF (Rose)
Swans they were taken last August. GJ.
This is a photo of Cowm Reservoir Whitworth Lancashire Angela (Kent)
I always check the Mares last thing of a night when they are close to Foaling. If the Foaling looks imminent I will let you know.
As much as I dislike felling trees, today we had to take down a Willow by the side of the Farm House. It just appeared about seven years ago in a flowerbed, and it has grown to well over twenty foot in that time. When I say it was by the side of the Farm House, it was within a couple of feet and was stopping light from getting into our kitchen and stopping most of the light to the flowerbed. The worse part about it was that every year it produced fluffy flowers that turn in to seed. When they drop they fly everywhere, making a mess all around the Farm Yard. If we leave the Farm House door open the kitchen finishes up full of the things.
Being so close to the Farm house we needed to be very careful in felling the tree. The main trunk of the tree had managed to separate into three, all very large and spreading out into different directions. One was leaning into mains electric overhead wires that feed one of our barns, another the largest was leaning towards the Farm House.
The easiest way to have felled the tree would have been to have cut it down as it stood, cutting it up in to pieces on the ground. that wasn’t possible being that the trunks leaned into different directions. We worked from a scaffold tower, cutting off the branches with handsaws so that we didn’t bring the mains electric cable down. We cut off a good forty large branches that would have been the size of ten to fifteen foot young trees. We were unable to get to the branches of the trunk that was leaning towards the Farm House with out damaging the Farm House roof, that we would leave until last.
After cutting away the branches off of two of the trunks, we tied a rope around the trucks and with wedges cut out, we pulled the trunks with the Quad Bike, into the direction that we wanted, so to avoid hitting the mains overhead wires. It was time to cut away the trunk leaning towards the Farm House. Again we tied a rope around the truck as high as we could so that we could pull it right away from the Farm House. We cut into the truck and started pulling it into the opposite direction of the Farm House. It was then that the tree decided to get its own back for us cutting it down. Instead of falling away from the House it twisted and fell to the side, landing precariously perched on the Farm House roof and a twelve foot chimney, the cut end was on the stump of the tree by a whisker. This was a bit of a problem. One wrong move could well have caused a bad accident or could have caused major damage to the Farm House roof and chimney.
We needed to wedge the trunk so that it would not fall any further. We managed after a lot of head scratching and two props to make it secure and safe. One of my Lads had to climb onto the Farm House roof and cut away the branches that we were unable to remove earlier. With other parts of the trunk removed to lighten it, we were able with four men to lift the trunk, to get it off of the roof and chimney. Fortunately the roof only suffered minor damage, just a couple of slates damaged. It could have been a lot worse.