Tag Archives: crabapple tree limb

The morning brought the sunshine, and it was a welcome sight. It was 5C this morning, when I opened the kitchen curtains to peer out at the thermometer. The day slowly warmed, and by mid afternoon it was quite pleasant.

The municipality where we live conducts a spring yard waste pickup. It will take place this week. During the winter a large branch of the Crabapple Tree in the front yard snapped off and lay suspended in the remaining tree branches. Today Attila took his tree saw and removed branches from it, until it fell to the ground. Then the cleanup began, which took all morning. Finally all the branches were bundled, the twigs gathered up and bagged in paper yard waste bags, and it was all piled at the end of the driveway, ready for yard waste pickup.

Looking out into the sunny back yard this morning, hundreds and hundreds of bright yellow dandelion blooms smiled right back at me. We have neighbours on three sides of us, and they don’t have dandelions in their lawns, which means they are using chemicals of some kind. I don’t want to use chemicals on our lawn. We have had the place for almost six years now, and not a drop of chemical fertilizer, insecticide, or herbicide, has come anywhere near our yard. That means that whatever grows in our yard is for practical purposes organically grown. Why destroy that for the sake of getting rid of a few dandelions. I do spray Wild Parsnip with the vinegar/epsom salt/dawn detergent mixture, so there have been three or four small spots that have been sprayed. But we don’t consider that mixture to be toxic to the environment, or to us.

This is the branch of the Crabapple tree that broke off last winter. Until this morning it hung suspended about 15 feet off the ground. Attila removed smaller branches from it until it came crashing down. It took hours to clean it up, and a chain saw was needed to cut the thick wood into logs. It is all by the curb now, ready for yard waste pickup.

Not all pictures portray the best of me. I have my doubts that this particular selfie will attract a wide range of admirers. Giant Maggie in May, it is interesting how shadows can show us a completely different side to ourselves.

The needles on the Tamarack in the back yard are bursting out, but still dwarfed by the seed cones. I love Tamaracks. We didn’t have any Tamaracks on our tender fruit farm, so I was late in becoming familiar with them. They shed their needles in the fall, the same as deciduous trees shed their leaves in the fall.
The first time I had seen them was around 1970, spotted during a drive to visit my Granny and Grandpa. I remember commenting to my Grandpa that there were a lot of dead coniferous trees along the road. He thought that was hilarious! Of course, they were Tamaracks. He teased me about dead coniferous trees for years, and I’ve never forgotten that Tamaracks shed their needles.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

12°C
Date: 1:00 PM EDT Tuesday 3 May 2016
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.2 kPa
Tendency: falling
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 12.4°C
Dewpoint: 3.7°C
Humidity: 55%
Wind: ESE 18 km/h

Quote

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Milan Kundera
1929 –
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1975)