Yesterday I did quite a bit of yard work and today I paid for it. However, it was not because of sore muscles. Instead I had very bad allergies, most likely from the tree work that I did. I do have to be careful when working with my trees. I always wear gloves since any scratches will have an inflammatory response. However, since I was cutting with a saw and generating a lot of small particles I guess I should have worn a mask. Note to self: Buy a mask to wear next time.

Here is how my tree looked on Saturday morning. This is even cut back from earlier in the year. I have slowly been cutting it back. The long range plan is to get rid of it entirely since it no longer has a good water source and really does not do much for shading the house anyway.

The first step was getting rid of the remaining small branches. Then it was time to get cutting on the trunk. Unfortunately I don’t have a large tree saw, but I do have a nice handheld saw.

It took a lot of work, but I finally had a piece of the trunk on the ground.

Here is how the tree looks now. I can now wait to borrow a bigger saw from someone before I take the rest of it down.

I also needed to prune back an unruly rose bush. I had been letting this one grow so it could develop some good roots.

Here the rose bush looks much better. It looks a bit fuller than it actually is because of the shadow on the fence. It is an interesting picture.

Then I had to figure out what to do with this overgrown bush. I planted this 17 years ago when I moved in and despite cutting it back quite often it has just grown too big.

I first tried to shape it a bit and reduce the height and width, but soon gave up. I took drastic action instead.

This very well may not recover from the drastic pruning that I did. If it doesn’t I will just take it out entirely and plant something else. Perhaps another rose bush.

This was also a very dusty job and probably contributed to the bad allergies today. I got up this morning and felt so out of it that I went back to bed and didn’t get up till the afternoon.

Steven