[AT] Thanksgiving Day tractor chores

Dean Vinson dean at vinsonfarm.net
Sun Nov 30 11:44:07 PST 2008


My kids and I drove up to my dad's farm in northeast Ohio for Thanksgiving,
and had a fine time.  In what seems to be becoming a Thanksgiving tradition
for us, we cut down a dead tree that had become a nuisance along one of the
farm lanes, and then had a great bonfire.  

Big old poplar I think, maybe three feet in diameter and 60 feet high.  To
increase the chances that the tree would fall downhill as we wanted, and not
onto on the nearby fenceline or back uphill across the lane itself, we tied
a very long rope around it up high, notched the trunk on the side we wanted
to fall towards, and then my dad used his Allis D-19 to gradually tension
the rope as my brother cut the trunk on the uphill side and my son drove in
some wedges.  I watched from several feet away so I could gauge which way
the tree was leaning and warn my brother and son off if things started to go
bad, and used some pre-arranged arm signals to tell my dad when to pull more
on the rope.  All went well, and the tree came down with a mighty crash,
much to the delight of assorted nephews and nieces watching from a safe
distance.   

Dad used the D-19 to drag over some big limbs that had fallen off other
nearby trees over the past several months, and we had a bonfire that's
probably still got a lot of heat left in it now, three days later.  Tending
that fire over the next day or two was a lot of fun, and we wished we had
some more vacation days to stay up there.

Motivated by all the fun, once home I got the M out and pulled down the
broken-off upper trunk of a tree that had fallen but gotten hung up in the
woods behind my house.  It had been out there since the big post-Ike
windstorm a couple months ago but I just hadn't gotten around to it.  The
crash coming down wasn't near the big one up at the farm but it felt good to
do some work with the M, and once again I'm wishing there was more.

I posted this same note with a couple of pictures attached on the ATIS
Forum.

Hope you've all had a good Thanksgiving.

Dean Vinson
Dayton, Ohio
www.vinsonfarm.net





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