February
2012
Still More Trees Down
This branch from the red
box gum (eucalyptus polyanthamus) broke off in one of our
rare high wind events. It lodged in my grafted hakea multilineata, breaking
some of that also.
Another branch also broke, and sat lodged in the top of my precious white
cedar.
Time for the tree fellers to return!
While they were here getting
me out of trouble I had another urgent job for them.
A few years ago, a couple of seedling acacias sprang up and this numbwhit
thought
"how lovely - a couple of silver wattles - the gang gang parrots are
going to love them"
except they weren't silver wattles, they were 'early black' wattles - in other
words 'weeds'.
They grew at an astonishing rate, and of course no self respecting gang gang
was ever
known to alight on its branches. Then the beetles attacked, and dead branches
began to litter the ground beneath both trees. I wanted them gone!
But one of them was very close to the bower bird's bower,
and I try to interfere with his territory as little as possible.
How fortunate it
was that, at this time he was moulting, and not active in his bower.
So down they came - together with the remaining trunk of the red box.
The garden looked a bit
of a battle zone, but we sorted it all into five categories.
1. Anything 65mm and under could go through our mulcher.
2. Anything of a decent diameter, shape and length would be useful
for garden edging.
3. Trunks which would stand with a near horizontal top would be plant
pot stands.
4. Odd shaped and beetled trunks would be given to a friend for firewood.
5. What was left will be burned - the smallest heap by far!
I also trimmed the lower branches from a lilly pilly to give me a good spot
for the muncher to build a fresh heap for me.
With a situation like this,
my 'scattergun' approach is not the best system.
But Jonni is a creature of methodical habits, and he soon mustered the troops
(me)
and issued instructions to get the mess sorted in an amazingly short time.
Perhaps there's something to be said for 'organisation'.
And once the debris was
reduced to lovely heaps of mulch and stacks of garden edging branches
I needed a little light relief, so I took the recently pruned long trailers
of the ornamental vine
to create another little roughly woven fence to stop the birds from scratching
the mulch
onto the path and filling up the shallow spoon drain taking rain water to
the pond.
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