Little Ducks: An Ocean of Trees.

On top of the goat/chicken fence and going on spider hunts, we did a lot of brush work. A. Lot.

I am so sore I can barely move today. I have blisters on my hands and feet (That is with wearing heavy duty work gloves and thick socks) I'm walking around like a little old woman, I'm sunburned and even my fingers hurt. But, it is a great workout and my biceps are looking good so it's okay.

For those of you that have no clue what I am talking about. Brush work refers to clearing up tree limbs, debris, and pine needles. We had around 60 trees cut down on our property. Now, before you start e-mailing me and telling me how awful that is, know that we had very good reasons for doing so.

First, quite a few were in danger of falling on our house. The others were cut down to make room for a pasture and a large fruit orchard. (I plan on having 40-50 fruit trees, we already have 17 ready to be planted.) The pines were very tall and sucking every ounce of sunlight from our property. We had moss growing instead of grass. We strategically left a lot of trees around the property. We are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds. Anyway, I am also going to put a walking path going out to the orchard and herbs all along the path. It is going to be so nice when we are done.

My husband and I came up with a good system of working the trees. He would cut the limbs up in about 4-6 foot sections, I would pile them up. As he was cutting, I would get them out of the way as quickly as I could and pile em up. Talk about a good workout. Biceps, abs, gluts, thighs, back, calves.... Who needs an exercise program when your doing all this work?

We had some tree guys come out to cut down and haul away the trees. They sell the trees to a local paper mill. It is how they make a living. So, the service was free for us and benefited them. We did not have enough trees to sell to the mill directly, so this was a good alternative for us. The only stipulation was that they cut off all the limbs and tree tops and left them on the property. They just haul away the trunk. So, that meant a lot of work for us. We knew it was going to be a lot of hard work, but oh my gravy. All I can say is that we are both in very good shape now. It has taken us several months to be almost done. We finished up the majority of the work over the weekend.

We still have some in the back of the house to do but it is not as overwhelming as what we have already tackled.

Our four-wheeler came in handy when we were working the pasture area. The trees were much more abundant and a whole lot bigger in that area. We used the wench on the four-wheeler to wrap around bundles of the tree tops and limbs, then drug them to the burn pile. It really saved us a lot of work. Poor four-wheeler. He went from moose, caribou, and sheep hunts in the Alaskan mountain ranges to being a farm mule. He is past his prime.