The Oak Tree

There's a very old oak tree in my yard. If I had to guess, I'd say it's about 300 years old. It has been receiving some well-deserved care and attention. 

This is how the oak looked when I bought the cottage in late summer 2023. You can barely see that it's there, because of the dense wall of rowans and maples surrounding it.

Here it is after handcutting down the young saplings with loppers. So much better already.

Last Saturday, it looked like this before I got out my chain saw. Late fall is ideal for cutting down trees, as there aren't many leaves obscuring the view, but no snow either.

Here's how it looked after. I'm loving how it's coming along! As always, it's not a 100 per cent done. There are a few more maples intertwined in the oak tree that I want to cut down, but they have to be felled onto the road and I need to set up warning signs before I do that. A job for another day.

I had to switch to my fish-eye lens to get the whole tree on camera. That is one big tree for a very tiny cottage. This was my first time using a chainsaw, it was so much fun! I had some issues with the chainsaw stopping every now and then, but I was able to troubleshoot it and got it working again. My chainsaw is a Makita electric chainsaw, and the battery needed changing fairly often. Sometimes the blade housing would get clogged with a gunk made up of sawdust and chain oil, and that needed to be cleaned out. 

I turned my attention to the rest of the front yard, just left of the oak tree. I already cut down one apple tree under the oak that was completely dead, but there are also more failing apple trees here. It's hard to make out in the picture, but there are two deformed apple trees in the foreground.

I cut down both of these suffering apple trees as they were not salvageable. The other one was rotten inside when I cut into it and smelled really bad. The other one was growing at a 45 degree angle. Behind them there are more apple trees that are very overgrown. Behind those, there is a lilac fence, also very overgrown. The lilac has spread and covered the remaining apple trees with its saplings. I will need to cut back the lilacs so I can get to the apple trees, to see if they are salvageable or not. My guess is that they all need to come down, as they appear to only have live branches at the very top of their crowns. Yess, more food for my chainsaw 😂! 

If I could actually carry a full-sized chain saw I would probably just become a lumberjane and never work at a desk again. Mine is just the smallest one I could find because I couldn't lift the normal-sized ones, hehe... Maybe me and my baby blade could be on branch duty? 🤔

I will probably leave the lilac fence for now and just trim it a little. In the future, I would like a traditional red picket fence like this one. I took this picture last summer when I was visiting Kuralan Kylämäki, an outdoor homestead museum in Turku. Behind it, I plan to have a long flowering perennial border with a few fruit trees planted in with the flowers.

The temperature was about 0 degrees celsius (freezing point), but I got very warm when playing lumberjack, so I took off my coat. I was wearing this fluffy fleece and all the wood chips stuck to it, oops! Not the best fashion choice 😄 Must stick to checkered flannel in the future 😁

I made a huge pile of branches, hopefully my wood chipper can handle it! In the foreground is my metal recycling pile.

In the summer, the same place looked like this! Some of the branches have been seasoning for a while now, but it has been raining when I've been at the cottage so I haven't been able to use my electric wood chipper. Seeing these images side by side, it just becomes so clear how much easier it is to see what's going on in the garden when there's no foliage. Hopefully, I can finish all the tree felling during winter and gain a bit more clarity in the garden.

I have a post coming up on the tiny guest house, which I don't believe I've mentioned on the blog before! I cleared it out for winter on the Saturday previous to this, but I didn't have the energy to write the post immediately. But stay tuned for that ☺️