I used to grow hay and barley for many, many years on my farm. Now as a retired man who loves to blog I want to tell you about the amazing trees my farm had and how I used to take care of them. I hope this exercise will teach you facts and tips about home tree care that you might not have known before, while also being entertaining and teaching you more about me and my past.
I had dozens of oak trees, many pine trees and also lots of fruit trees like apples, pears and plums, that I had to look after for several decades. I had my family and farmhands to help me of course, but much of the work of pruning, topping trees, trimming them, all had to be done by my old wizened hands.
I enjoyed the work though, even though it was tough stuff. I often worked my back hard on the farm, reaping and sowing barley, but when it came to rising early for “tree day” as we’d call it on the farm, my back was in for a special treat of pain. We called it “tree day” because that was the day on the farm when all the workers got together and planned we’d tame all the trees on our land. Tree day usually came about once a month or whenever major tree work was needed. We needed tons and tons of firewood on that farm, so one of the priorities on tree day was to see what dead trees we could chop down to turn them into firewood. We also had a coppice to maintain for wicker branches that the lady’s of the house turned into baskets and other things to sell at the market in town in the summer.
So, as you may be getting the picture, trees were a major part of the daily ins and outs of our barley farm. Now that I’m retired and move among several small houses in Western Canada, I simply get my tree work done by reputable tree service Victoria, BC companies. But back in those days when I was young and ran my farm with discipline like a sea captain, it was often me harnessed up in the tree canopies with a chainsaw cutting away branches. Many of my farmhands were scared of heights, but I showed them up by climbing up high into our tallest treetops to fell dead branches. One day I had a scare and thought I’d fall over 100 feet down to my death but my harness saved me and I’ll never forget the way my heart felt like it was going to fly out of my throat.
There was one hard task the boys and I couldn’t do ourselves, however, and that was grinding out some particularly nasty tree stumps that were getting in the way of our tractors. With the farm equipment we had it would have taken us days of majorly hard toiling to get all those roots up with picks but we had a stump chipper come in with a professional tree service company and the work was done in a single day, just after lunch!
We never thought it worth getting our own industrial stump grinding machine but one tool I’d definitely recommend that every farm and country household should have is a quality chainsaw. You can pick up a chainsaw at any Home Depot or department store and if you take care of it you’ll 1000X the money you spent on that thing throughout your lifetime. Though I had to change the chain on it many times, I must’ve made over 10,000 cuts with my trusty old chainsaw. I still have it as an antique on my mantelpiece.
In the future I hope to talk about other useful aspects of home care that I learned running a farm. I plan to have a post about how I kept my farm clean and tidy, as well as how I kept all my vehicles and heavy equipment working efficiently, stuff like that. I enjoy rambling about my old farm life and I hope you find it interesting. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.