Mrs. Ombud and I were watching a movie (Little Fish, I think) when the phone rang. We don’t always pick up during a movie, figuring they’ll leave a message if it’s important, but when I heard my next door neighbor’s voice I hit pause and got the phone. He was talking about some large branch that fell in our yard, across the fence into his.
We talked for a bit, and then Mrs. O and I went out into the yard. This was after quite the big wind storm we had here, with gusty bursts of rain, on Tuesday October 13. It was still very dark and wet out in the yard, so it was hard to see the damage. But the next morning the view from our back deck looked like this:
The limbs fell from the back of the yard toward our homes, straddling the fence line and falling on his sheds (notice dent). Our neighbor has a chainsaw, so we made plans to get out there the next day and chop up the branches. I clambered up into the old kid’s house a prior owner built in the back corner of our lot, and took a picture from our yard into our neighbor’s.
I also stood up by our house and took a picture of the tree. The point where the larger branch snapped off is obscured, but on its way down it took out another limb, and that’s what you can see here:
As you can see, it’s quite a way up there.
So my neighbor and I got together and cranked up the chainsaw, heaving branches away from the fence into the middle of our yard, until we had quite a pile, and I stacked all of the logs he sectioned off, wondering in the back of my head, who do we know who needs firewood?
Poplar probably isn’t the best, as it’s so light it’ll burn quickly. We’ll find out; I stacked it under the kid’s tree house. My wife’s cousin has a house up in Inverness with a fireplace, a cozy retreat, so we’ll toss the wood into the back of our truck and drive it up to Inverness some weekend in the near future.
Another view from the kid’s house, sjhowing how much foliage came down. (Every week now, we fill the green waste bin–and I mean fill it. I’ve been trimming branches and packing it down to give the city as much compostable leafy matter each week as we possibly can.
Finally, the pears. The blessed pears I’ve been waiting to ripen since, oh, July. we’ve been harvesting like crazy here. most of them stay pretty green, but they do ripen sort of. And I have a coworker who likes some hard, unripened fruit (pears among them). He has a whole bin in our downstairs fridge now, full or pears. (“Put them in the fridge!” he tells me. “Don’t let them ripen any further!”)
We’ve had a very nice pear cobbler, and a pear pie, and we gave a lot of the pears to our neighbor with the chainsaw. A day or so after the big blow, when I took these pictures, I was trying to show the fallen trunk through the leaves, and you can’t see much, but you can see that in mid-October we still have fruit onthe tree.
And on this note, I’m going back upstairs to see if I can take a nap before getting up and going to work.
good grief, that’s an enormous branch! Lucky it came down at night when nobody was out there under it.
I’m intrigued – does your friend have some special recipe which requires unripe, rock-hard fruit, or does he just like to eat them that way?
Wow, man, that is pretty wild.
We had a couple of branches fall down during Hurricane Ike. One came really close to hitting my vehicle and the other almost hit our bedroom window.
Yikes! That’s a big branch. I’m glad it didn’t do more damage.
The pears look wonderful. Your photo and mention of them reminds me that I should plant a pear tree.
Those pears are beautiful. That branch is a mess.
Ben, with a branch that big, you could stick it into a deep hole, give it lots of water, and it might grow from there. We do that with cottonwood branches that break off, and a good many of them survive and grow to be wonderful big trees. Cottonwood is a type of poplar. Maybe, if it’s not too late, you can do that.
Trucie-woo: No, he likes tart, hard, unripe fruit. Chilled. He cannot get fruit unripe enough for him at the market.
Julian, your scrapes sound far closer than ours was. Robin, & J, it was a mess, and I do feel a bit bad that it dented our neighbor’s shed. In a pie or cobbler, I do like the pears–Robin, you could do worse than to plant a pear tree.
yB, what a cool idea! If I had more yard, I’d give it a try. At this point, opening up some room is more the goal.
And I’m also looking at the rest of that tree and wondering if it is time for us to take some more of it down.