The Beast

Last weekend's snowfall caused some significant tree damage in our backyard in addition to an almost 48 hour power outage.  We had a festival of damage: huge branches, trees that broke in half, trees that uprooted, and more fence damage.  I know the hurricane and this freak October snowfall are both extremely rare events, but we're sick of the clean-up and are starting to think that our fence installation is cursed.  

Large tree missing the whole top half.

More trees missing their tops.

Uprooted tree.

Fence damage from another tree on the water company property.

Large branch.

We borrowed a chipper shredder from my dad.  This thing is a BEAST (aka Eats Trees for Breakfast).  We spent the day collecting branches and putting them through the chipper.  Andy worked the larger branches and I worked from the other side feeding smaller branches into the hopper.  Yes, that is a step stool.  I needed it reach the hopper.

  

Getting smaller.

And smaller.

We also spent some time this morning removing all of the old plants from the garden.  We wanted to use the mulch from the chipper shredder to cover the walkways.  

Spreading all of the new mulch.

Just to prove that I really do work since I'm always taking pictures of Andy.

All of the walkways covered.

Some leaf mulch on the actual beds and the garden is ready for winter.

Hurricane Irene

Remember last week when I posted about our brand-new fence?  Well hurricane Irene apparently didn't like it and decided to drop a tree on it.  It could have been much worse -- the damage isn't too bad, no trees fell on the house (my biggest worry after the first tree fell around 10pm) and we didn't lose power for an extended period of time.  The loss of power would have been the worst because our sump pump is still running this afternoon and while the hand pump we bought as a backup worked fine, Andy and I couldn't have kept up with pumping water by hand all night.  The tree that fell wasn't even on our property.  It came from the property surrounding the water tower behind us and took out the water company fence too.  We heard it fall last night but weren't able to see what really happened until this morning. 

 We had a hard time figuring out what really happened becuase it looks like a tree split in half between the 2 fences.  The tree in the center of the picture is actually half of the tree that sheared off and stuck in the ground vertically.  It's a huge piece -- probably 20-30 feet tall and standing straight in the air. It was swaying in the wind.

And all of this after we spent Thursday night and Friday trying to board up the house at the shore and moving as much furniture to the second floor as possible because they were calling for significant flooding.

 All boarded up.

 Helping the neighbor take one of the boats out of the water.  

 Once we started moving furniture Kodak decided this was serious stuff and he should save himself first by hiding in the bathtub.