The other part of the Prairie-Cane damage was the Oak Tree in back. This tree has had two high velocity wind breakage events over the last year. First was May 28, 2024. This was the incident that looked like the Oak Tree exploded. There were bits of Oak Tree everywhere. I clean up this mess while the roof construction was happening. But there were still a lot of limbs in a pile by the garden.
Then this last storm broke the Oak Tree some more. Not as bad this time, but still made a big mess. The remaining Oak Tree seems to be OK. It is growing, although it is a bit sparse looking. I have an ample supply of Oak for the Smoker, more on that later.
This has been a work in progress for 4 weeks. I'm mainly working on this on the weekends. I was ready to go Saturday, but we had heavy rain, and the ground was saturated. Sunday was a little dryer, so I started moving things around. There was another storm involved here, three years ago, March 2022. That storm snapped one of the Cedar Trees in back. I saved a lot of the Cedar with intentions of crafting something out of it, but it sat there in the yard. So a lot of the wood has mushrooms growing on it, and it is time to move all of this stuff out, so I can work on the garden...
I have a new spot for the smoker wood storage, under the eaves of the house. Here it should get far less direct water. The other location on the patio was directly exposed to rain. Speaking of sawed wood, my chainsaw has been a tremendous help cleaning up the back yard. Twin Oaks Solutions was here a few weeks ago. They have a chipper, and could have cleaned this up that same day. But the great idea was that I could get a heap of smoker wood from those Oak branches, and that worked.
But there is a lot of scraps too. Most of the scrap pile is the Cedar from 3 years ago. The chainsaw was something I picked up free, broken. My favorite, LOL! So, anyway it has ongoing issues. Everything on this saw was in a thoroughly used, and perhaps abused state. So I gotta work on it frequently. So, in the middle of this process it wasn't cutting the Oak very well. I got to looking at the chain, and the teeth were a mess, some broken. I decided to put a new chain on it, and it made a tremendous difference. I ran through the rest of the limbs in a couple hours.
Now the backyard and the garden are limb free. The smoker wood is on the smoker wood rack. The scrap wood is out on the front curb. The leaves are the remaining mass of the cleanup and I use that as mulch everywhere. Like on the spots where I had logs sitting around, when you move the logs it leaves exposed Texas clay soil, so I put down a layer of mulch over it. There were many spots after the cleanup that needed covering.
Another cleanup item is replacing the tree that was destroyed. Well that is not a quick fix kind of thing. I do want another large shade tree there, but I need to let the ground in that spot recover. Time will let the ground break down the old tree roots, and then we can install a new tree in a couple years. In the meantime we have Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree. I guess it is our temporary fill in tree. It held the space when the other Bradford Pear spontaneously died. I guess it was maybe in 2020 when that one died, and we put Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree in its spot until we planted the Red Oak in April 2023.
Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree is over 6 feet tall, and its living mainly in a 5 gallon nursery pot. When I put it somewhere for a long period of time it will stretch it roots into the surrounding ground a little. I probably should find a permanent spot for it eventually. But for now it is back in the front yard.
