The Beast

Welcome to Woodchipper Weekend! Friday afternoon, we picked up the woodchipper we rented from a rental company in a nearby town. We needed to use the vehicle with the tow hitch on it because that's how this thing got home. We put it into position by the enormous brush pile and then it began to rain. A little rain wouldn't have stopped us, but this was big, fat rain. The skies opened, the thunder rumbled and it continued in this way for the rest of the day, it seemed. We did not chip wood on Friday.

Saturday morning began beautifully. The sun was shining, the birds we singing, and we were going to get rid of the enormous brush pile! Happy day!!

There it is. Isn't it a beaut? I know it might be a little difficult to get a perspective on how big that pile is.  

There is a different shot. The pile goes around the corner of the chicken run (you can see fence posts to the right of the pile). What's that yellow thing in the picture? That would be the Beast!

The woodchipper is like a snowblower, but scarier. It is sitting in front of the now almost completely refurbished chicken coop that my wonderful husband has been working on just because I said to him, "I kind of miss having chickens."

Before we get started chipping, I'd like to show you some pictures from the side of the Beast.

Holy crap!! How's that for some images!

In all actuality, there are some great safety features that keep most idiot humans from feeding themselves into the woodchipper. (Anyone seen Fargo?)

Truthfully, it was AWESOME. You stick a huge branch / limb in there, and it just grabs it and chews it up and spits it out. We went through that brush pile in no time! What was left was actually a relatively small pile of chips.

Then we began more cutting and trimming and lopping until we had another pile. Husband did a good job of cutting off dead limbs from our very old apple tree. (This is the apple tree that only seriously produces every other year and we don't use the apples because they are quite soft, not a good flavour and we don't spray for any kind of insects. I just keep raking the apples up and dumping them. ) Now, of course, that it has been pruned, I'm sure it will produce even more useless apples. Husband keeps saying he is going to learn to make cider. But that's another project...

Can you see him? He's on the blue ladder. It's like the children's book, "Each, Peach, Plum, Pear". Oh how I love that book. He's using a Saws-All because we don't have a big chainsaw. We are very adaptable here.

In a little while (in the above 30 degree heat) we had created another big pile. The Beast easily ate that up and spit it out, too.

These are some of the woodchips that ended up in the chicken run - not as much as you would think. Today will be a finish up day with a bit more cutting and a whole lot of raking to clean up the bits of branches that have accumulated all over our immaculate lawn (eye roll).  Because this is a holiday weekend with Monday being a civic holiday, we don't have to return the Beast until Tuesday morning. It is so satisfying to use, I'm a little afraid we might start cutting down trees just to see them being fed through and reduced to tiny bits!