The Giant Sycamores

 aka The Elephants in the Garden?

My god, these things dominate. They are totally out of control. Nothing else stands a chance. It's like War of the Worlds down there. 

I hate them and they have to go.

Well, that's not strictly true. I love the amount of firewood that they are going to give me. And I'm not going to kill them - just cut them back to ground level. The likelihood is that they will then grow several new stalks each and research (i.e. Google) seems to suggest that each stalk will be arm thickness after 3 or 4 years. So I figure that, with some careful management and regular coppicing, they could provide a fairly regular source of firewood.

This is the small one.

And this is the big bugger.

They don't look so bad once the leaves have fallen - trust me on this, they are thugs!

This tree felling lark creates chaos once the trunks start to fall, so I was keen to do as much as I could and get it processed onto the wood pile out of the way before the big guns arrive at the weekend. I started off by getting rid of as many of the smaller lower branches off as I could, but I kind of got carried away and surprised myself as to what I could achieve with my cheap electric chainsaw actually. 

I got the easy 4 trunks of the smaller tree down (i.e. the ones that were likely to easily fall in the right direction as I shouted "timber"!) Deeply satisfying work and another few weeks of firewood on the pile 😀

A very long and intense winter's day, with 2 chainsaws going for most of it, saw all of the sycamore trunks taken down, with just a few heavy trunks left to chop off at ground level once there's a bit more room to process wood. But I can do that with my electric chainsaw.

The garden looked like a hurricane had hit it! There was SO much wood to process on the ground to keep safe places to fell into.

The next reasonable day saw me out there trying to make sense of the mayhem. I think the size of the log pile has doubled! Most importantly, I needed to clear space to be able to burn off all of the smaller branches (ideally I would have chipped this, but the chipper/shredder I hired last time is out of action.)

A 4 hour fire, which was still very hot 24 hours later, saw it all got rid of and a lot more timber cut and stacked but there is probably another day's work to process the remaining wood and cut down the sycamore stumps to their lowest level.