More Yardwork

Went over to Grandma’s today to clean up her yard from the ice damage we received 2 months ago. The township in which she lives offers free chipping up to 8″ for whatever you got. That’s a no brainer. Instead of paying a tree service or some yard guy hundreds of dollars to do it, all you have to do is drag and stack it all to the edge of the yard.

Sweet! Should only take a couple of hours.

After a whole day of dragging this is what we have.

We’re still not done.

We’re close. Only a couple of hours left. I just hope we don’t run out of yard frontage to the road.

The other labor intensive part is all the little branches. Most of this is white pine and the what I call secondary branches just explode all over the place. To deal with that, we tried renting a smaller 2″ chipper from Home Depot. It has wheels and you can roll it around. The thought was we’d move it between locations and chip all the small stuff right there where it was. This would be easier than raking it up and hauling it to the large pile hoping the township guys would capture it all and chip it too.

The plan would have worked great if it actually chipped. It’s more of a mangler really. Instead of the 2′ pieces coming out in tiny thumb size chips, it comes out in 4, 6″ lengths. Occasionally it chips, but mostly just breaks things up making another mess to deal with.

So yeah. We’ll finish that up tomorrow and who knows when we’ll get to the 7 yards of fresh mulch in our driveway or all the little sticks still in our yard.

– b