(no subject)
Spent the whole day today at my parents' place helping to clean up the two treetops that were still occupying the front yard.
There were two decent-sized bloodwoods down that used to grow close together at the right-angle bend of the driveway. It looks like the ground got saturated enough that one of them came up by the roots, pulling the other with it, along with a fair amount of garden and retaining wall. In a very strange-but-I'm-not-complaining coincidence, the first tree fell straight down once side of the bend in the driveway, and the second at right-angles to it - straight down the other part of the driveway. Very neat :)
The local Fire Brigade (of which Dad has been a member for something like forty years, now) turned up on Saturday morning and chain-sawed enough of the trunk up that they could get the cars out, but there was still leaves and branches all over that needed to be dealt with. Luckily there was almost no damage other than to the landscaping - the first tree left a slight ding in the back of Dad's truck, and the second knocked a few tiles off the roof of the neighbours' garage. Not bad considering both trunks were about as wide as my shoulders - these weren't small trees.
The day involved much chopping of small branches and mulching them for the garden. Cutting the branches into pieces that the mulcher could was sort of sad - these trees were old friends, and now they're reduced to sawdust :( One of the trees had been about to flower, so we were chopping up great bunches of new leaves and flower buds - but it's not like leaving them all over the yard was going to help, so into the mulcher they went and the local parrots are down one food-source over the next few weeks. Not all the birds mind though - A kookaburra sat on the fence the whole day and watched us chop stuff up, flying down occasionally to grab something out of the pile of branches - I guess it's not every day that the canopy is down where something the weight of a kookaburra can reach it!
Once the mulcher and the chainsaw ran out of fuel, we hauled the medium-sized branches out to the street for the council to collect, then stacked up all the chopped bits of trunk up to season for firewood - there's at least three-years' worth in that pile by my reckoning!
Unfortunately spending my life sitting at a computer isn't exactly good preparation for hauling bits of tree around, nor chopping hardwood with secateurs, so I'm now sporting a full set of blistered fingers and not at all looking forward to how sore I am almost certain to be by tomorrow morning. Oh well - exercise for the week.
Driving up to Mum and Dad's this morning, I was actually surprised at how little visible damage there was - two trees on footpaths and one through a hedge just up the hill from me were about all. On reflection, though, it may be that the obvious mess just got cleaned up already: this is, after all, a part of Sydney where gardening is practically a competitive sport. Driving back tonight there were several stretches of road through Turramurra and Pymble with no streetlights, so the local cleanup is clearly not actually complete.
Of course, we've had it easy. Mum and Dad spent Saturday night at my brother's place in Singleton, and though he was fine, the rest of the town definitely wasn't: the water on the oval down the hill from them was apparently deep enough that it was up to the tops of the basketball hoops. Both my brother and his wife are mining engineers, and both got called in today to start dealing with the mess on the ground at work - I'm really glad that my work problems don't involved collapsed bridges, missing survey pegs or fifteen metres of water in an open-cut pit!
Back to work tomorrow - bleagh.
There were two decent-sized bloodwoods down that used to grow close together at the right-angle bend of the driveway. It looks like the ground got saturated enough that one of them came up by the roots, pulling the other with it, along with a fair amount of garden and retaining wall. In a very strange-but-I'm-not-complaining coincidence, the first tree fell straight down once side of the bend in the driveway, and the second at right-angles to it - straight down the other part of the driveway. Very neat :)
The local Fire Brigade (of which Dad has been a member for something like forty years, now) turned up on Saturday morning and chain-sawed enough of the trunk up that they could get the cars out, but there was still leaves and branches all over that needed to be dealt with. Luckily there was almost no damage other than to the landscaping - the first tree left a slight ding in the back of Dad's truck, and the second knocked a few tiles off the roof of the neighbours' garage. Not bad considering both trunks were about as wide as my shoulders - these weren't small trees.
The day involved much chopping of small branches and mulching them for the garden. Cutting the branches into pieces that the mulcher could was sort of sad - these trees were old friends, and now they're reduced to sawdust :( One of the trees had been about to flower, so we were chopping up great bunches of new leaves and flower buds - but it's not like leaving them all over the yard was going to help, so into the mulcher they went and the local parrots are down one food-source over the next few weeks. Not all the birds mind though - A kookaburra sat on the fence the whole day and watched us chop stuff up, flying down occasionally to grab something out of the pile of branches - I guess it's not every day that the canopy is down where something the weight of a kookaburra can reach it!
Once the mulcher and the chainsaw ran out of fuel, we hauled the medium-sized branches out to the street for the council to collect, then stacked up all the chopped bits of trunk up to season for firewood - there's at least three-years' worth in that pile by my reckoning!
Unfortunately spending my life sitting at a computer isn't exactly good preparation for hauling bits of tree around, nor chopping hardwood with secateurs, so I'm now sporting a full set of blistered fingers and not at all looking forward to how sore I am almost certain to be by tomorrow morning. Oh well - exercise for the week.
Driving up to Mum and Dad's this morning, I was actually surprised at how little visible damage there was - two trees on footpaths and one through a hedge just up the hill from me were about all. On reflection, though, it may be that the obvious mess just got cleaned up already: this is, after all, a part of Sydney where gardening is practically a competitive sport. Driving back tonight there were several stretches of road through Turramurra and Pymble with no streetlights, so the local cleanup is clearly not actually complete.
Of course, we've had it easy. Mum and Dad spent Saturday night at my brother's place in Singleton, and though he was fine, the rest of the town definitely wasn't: the water on the oval down the hill from them was apparently deep enough that it was up to the tops of the basketball hoops. Both my brother and his wife are mining engineers, and both got called in today to start dealing with the mess on the ground at work - I'm really glad that my work problems don't involved collapsed bridges, missing survey pegs or fifteen metres of water in an open-cut pit!
Back to work tomorrow - bleagh.