Chipping Weekend

It's been a while since we rented the chipper/shredder and dealt with the brush pile. Maybe a couple of years? In a bit of ideal timing, I planned to get it this weekend, then a big storm moved in Friday. But the forecast actually said 10% chance of rain today as of yesterday evening, which worked fine for us. It was overcast and looming when we got started, but looking at the weather it was not going to really rain all day, so we went for it.

So we had a giant pile of brush to chip up (8' x 10' and maybe 4 feet deep), plus one of the buddleias mysteriously died last summer. I left it up because it was home to a stupid number of chickadees, but they moved out for the winter which gave me my opportunity to make some changes without making the birds angry at me. With the big renovation coming up we are going to have to cut down the Asian pears, so my plan was to cut out the dead buddleia and put in some new Asian pears over there.

The chipper we used to rent is no longer available, but this model was. It's a nice little chipper, but a little harder to clean when stuff gets stuck in it (which we found out partway through the afternoon). Noel got started with working through the pile, and once he was underway I took down the buddleia (Sawzall for the win!) and dug through the pile to get branches out.

There was a lot of stuff in the pile that was not branches, because it's been there for a while, and as we cleared it out I raked out the chipped pile over the area. Someday we are going to put in a pond in this location and until then I just really don't know what to do with it, so branch pile/wood chip heap works OK for now.

Toward the end of the day we were down to our last pile of stuff to chip up and Rosie insisted on going and lying down on the newly chipped wood.

She is 13 and mostly deaf, so I guess the noise didn't bother her, nor did the overblow of dust and wood chips. We were hand-feeding the chipper so I wasn't worried about her catching a stone, but even so it was uncomfortable for me to be in that spot so I'd think it would not be so great even for her. I finally lured her away and brushed her off, but she's still kind of covered in wood dust.

And there it is: a four-foot tall brush pile plus an added whole small tree reduced to six inches of wood chips on the ground. Not bad. It sprinkled on and off through the day, but never hard enough to make us abandon ship. The weather was oddly patchy: at one point i realized it was raining only over the metal shed, which was maybe 10 feet away from me, but not where I was.

We also loaded a bunch of stuff into the truck to take to the dump, both construction debris and random things that have lived past their useful life. Looking forward to getting some of that stuff out of here.

The forecast for tomorrow is more rain, and achy backs.

posted by ayse on 02/07/15