Men at work

This covers two recent developments around the property.

The Eastern end of our house has always been a bit of a goat track, and we have had plans to fix it for some years.  A bunch of pavers were acquired to form an edge and various flattish rocks collected to form a nice crazy paving effect.  After a little initial work I realised how much effort was going to be required to  level this off etc and everything had gone on hold.

Then Frances suggested using the pavers to form an edge and filling the rest of the path with Eucalyptus mulch (of which we still have a good supply following the visit from Country Energy's power line clearing contractors).  After a little thought, that seemed like a good idea so I got stuck in.

Here is the result to date.

At the other end of the house ever since we have been here I have been concerned about the state of a large dead stringybark (Eucalyptus macrorhynca).  It has leant towards a power pole in one direction and, with a little swivel to slightly change direction, could annihilate a fence and our clothes line if it fell.  Eventually we got a recommendation for a tree-surgeon from Burra who did good work at a reasonable price (we had heard tales of them charging $5,000 to take out a tree).  So we got Garry to give us a quote for pruning  and it was indeed a good price.

And he did a very good job.  Here is the an early stage of the work;

It isn't the start of the work since there was a lot of thinking before work started.  Frances watched most of the process and said he was like a medical surgeon with much time spent working out where to cut and relatively little with the chainsaw running.  A few more images taken by Frances, with remarkable timing (particularly the last two).

I now have a couple of days work with my own chainsaw tidying up!