Honey, I crushed the dog and other lumberjack adventures

The dog is my wife's favorite. Chili is a feisty and yappy chihuahua mix. The only lapdog in our four-dog pack. (All mutts. All rescued in one way or another.) Dr. Spouse babies that dog like no other mammal in this household. A couple of years ago, we spent an unholy pile of money on back surgery for him. (I'm glad we did but don't let Dr. Spouse know.)

OK, I didn't really kill the dog but I came damn close. The weapon? A 70-foot water oak.

The oak was destined to come down last fall as part clearing the back corner of our large yard for our burgeoning citrus orchard. (Hurricane Gustav gave us more sunlight in that corner and inspired the idea to add to our pair of stasumas.) That means the tree's going and it's time to get me out of the way.

All went to plan. The tree tilted by a few millimeters. I shut off the saw, stepped back and pulled one plug from my ear. The gap grew in slow motion with a sound I love: that crackling of the uncut trunk ripping apart; the whoosh of leaves a branches heading toward earth and that final, satisfying siesmic thump.

One problem. Chili.

He'd decided to bask in the sun and watch me work from a spot under the now-falling tree. I didn't see him until the oak was on the way down. Time slowed but I never had a moment to yell at him. He looked up at the falling tree and decided to get up. He looked up at the tree falling faster and decided to move. He looked up one last time at the tree, realized just how fast it was coming, and turned on the afterburners.

In my mind's eye, I can see a branch as big as my wrist came within inches of smacking him. That's seared into my memory.

I don't remember hearing much of that tree going down. The rush of adrenaline left nothing in my ears but the pounding of my heart.

Dr. Spouse heard/felt the thump of felled tree and came out of the house to investigate. She found Chili waiting at the back door, shivering uncontrolably. I learned a lesson: lock up the dogs before you break out the chainsaw.

I did just that last Sunday when I set out to take down the last tree in our orchard corner, an old elm damaged by Gustav. It stood a few feet from the under-construction chicken coop. I figureed I should finally take it down before I put the walls on the coop's floor. I didn't want to tempt fate. If something went wrong, I'd lose the floor and not the walls.

With the dog's locked up and C., our 12-year-old, watching from a safe distance, I went to work. (Dr. Spouse sent her out with a cell phone. Just in case.) The trunk was thick and I struggled with the notch and I struggled with the back cut. I had resort to pounding a splitting wedge into the backcut to start the elm on it's way down.

One more quick cut with the saw and the tree started ... to fall ... directly at the satsumas.

I yelled. "Oh, NOoooo."

C. remembers me yelling something else as I watched the elm head right for those beloved and productive satsumas. (We got about 200 pounds of fruit from each of them the last three years.)
I'm sticking to "Oh, no." I'm sure that's what I yelled.

I had a lot of time to think as the disaster unfolded: how would I explain this to Dr. Spouse; at least it's missing the coop; maybe it won't be so bad. I'd like to say that I prayed but Divine Intervention did not cross my mind.

I didn't ask for His help but I got it.

As the elm fell to south (I wanted it to go west), it twisted and rolled to right and missed the satsumas by 6-8 feet. Branches gave a small fig an improptu pruning but it will survive.

I heard the thump this time. A most satisfying sound.

That's C. looking at all the wood she'll have to move. The satsumas are on the right.

Mission Creep and Brutal Nature

Dr. Spouse has a perfect term for what I ended up doing Sunday: Mission Creep.

We had a good bit of rain Saturday and working the soil Sunday was out of the question. I did promise her that I would move a couple of barrowloads of good dirt (store-bought, I must admit) into one of our 4-by-8-foot vegetable beds. Dr. Spouse wanted to plant some spinach and the neglected bed needed more dirt.

(Happy and tasty cauliflower and broccoli in two of the raised beds)

I planned to prune back the muscadine vines; something that we'd never done. In the spirit of our getting more serious and focusing more attention on the productive parts of the yard, I wanted to tame those wild vines. They produced a decent crop last year but I botched the jam making process.

I also wanted to complete the tear-down on the crumbling playhouse. It will be resurrected as 6-by-8-foot hen house. I must complete that in the next several weeks if we are to join a friend in ordering chicks.

(C., our youngest, helps clean up during the playhouse tear-down)

I ended up ruling out moving more dirt into our neglected blueberry bed. The dirt was too wet and heavy to struggle with. I was as much concerned with my back as the rickety wheel barrow.

On the bottom of my list was sorting and bagging the last batch of charcoal. (Not just the latest but the last batch. More on that later.)

But those plans fell by the wayside. Moving dirt into the vegetable garden, I kept passing our huge bed of canna lillies. It's in a crescent about 30 feet long and 6 feet across at the deepest part. When bought the place a decade ago, cannas were scattered here and there. When they got in the we dug them up and either moved them ore potted them.

Several years ago, I used a rented tiller to create that big bed. I stuck down some canna rhizomes and pretty much left them alone. That's been much of our operation around here: you what we have and follow with benign neglect.

Some winters we'd clean up the frost-burnt leaves and stalks before new growth started. Some we didn't.

In passing on Saturday, Dr. Spouse asked me break out the trimmer and whack down the skraggy canna remains. We'll one thing led to another -- the trimmer balked after a fine start, for one -- and I ended up spending a few hours raking out the bed.

... And cutting a trench around the bed to keep the grass out of the cannas and the cannas out of the grass.

... And extending the trench down to a shallow retention pond to ease drainage. (This is South Louisiana, after all.)

... And moving barrow loads of canna debris, turf and dirt over to the compost and carefully forking them into a bin. (That's gonna be some good stuff in a few months.)

(Here's the lawn-canna dividing trench about halfway done with vegetable garden in background)

One thing led to another and we ended up with a fairly tidy canna bed and a bin full of quality compost-to-be. (The pruners never got within 20 feet of the muscadine vines. But hey, I've got a four-day weekend coming up. I'll put that on the list.)

At one point, Dr. Spouse came over to check on my efforts. I puffed out my chest and bragged on my labor. She muttered an appropriate level of appreciation and was about to head back to her toil in the vegetable beds when two of the dogs came ripping through a shady, treed area we call a woodland "garden."

Grim and Lucy were in hot pursuit of something down in the leaf litter. Judging that we'd seen a nearby mole tunnel that had been recently dug up, we jumped to a conclusion. They dug furiously past the leaves, into the soil and under a wrist-thick root. They dug with hackles up and growling at the other dogs who tried to push into the action.

Suddenly they stopped. Lucy, a low-slung bassett mix, quivered from nose to toes. Grim, a tall pit bull mix, had his ears at alert. Just as suddenly, they zoomed in one something a foot to the left. In seconds, Grim won. He had mole in his mouth. We heard the death squeak even before we saw the pink nose and feet.

We find mole carcasses on a regular basis in the yard but this was the first mole hunt we'd witnessed. It carried a certain small thrill, watching those dogs being the predators they are deep down inside.

I felt a pang of sorrow for the mole but it was, afterall, a pest. The pang was fleeting.

On the other hand, as Dr. Spouse pointed out, the grubs were cheering.

(Moles eat grubs, for those of you who don't know.)