Last week, I wrote a post about trimming the trees at the Pandala/Respiro garden, meaning the garden behind the bakery and adjacent restaurant. I was pretty happy with the turn out. And then I came into the garden on Tuesday and saw this:
There are two theories floating. One is that the the neighbor's tree got jealous by the treatment that my trees got and wanted some for himself, so he came over. The second one is that he fell madly in love with the avocado tree after the trim and had to... well... you can see it. Trees are just animals, too.
I started out just chopping away a little, as many of the branches as I could. Which wasn't easy. I'm not a fan of heights. Then I went on carving a V into the stem, before I took a pause to think. At that point, I was still very careful.
Then, luckily, one of the clients coming in for lunch told me that he had worked trees all his life. I must say, I love this community. One of those retirees always has the right skill at the right time. Or the tool - I had borrowed an electric hand saw. Reciprocal saw I think they're called. Not a chain saw.
Anyway, he told me to start on the high end, which I really didn't want to do. You can see that in the picture above. It looks small on the ground, but at 4m height? O boy. I don't like heights. And he was like "Just have one leg on the avocado branch, and one on the ladder!"
"You're the professional!" I said with a shaking voice. "Not anymore, one is only professional if getting paid!" He answered. "I`ll pay you with a pack of cookies!" He laughed. (He really enjoyed the cookies, though, and bought 2 more packs the next day.) But first, he wanted to get a rope on the upper side of the branch so he could pull it to our side, so it wouldn't fall towards the other neighbor's roof. How to get the rope up there? Well, look at this:
Nothing ever beats experience. The more experience one has, the easier it is to get creative. I would've never thought of cutting a slit into a hard avocado to get the rope in and then using it as weight to be able to throw it. Worked like a charm.
When that invader branch finally broke, the tension released made my avocado branch and ladder shake way too much. I don't like heights. Shaking heights are worth. And yes, 4m on a ladder is high. I can stand at an abyss like the one above and be kind of fine. But on a ladder? Nope.
The electric saw overheated very short after that, so I went to the hand saw to give it the rest. You can see in the video what happened afterwards...
By the way, I'm trying out www.snapie.io here as it supports uploading videos into the post. No idea how that will turn out. @meno is still working on stuff, and apparently my browser always makes more troubles than everything else.
While falling down from the wall, my arm got caught in the lemon tree underneath, and scratched quite a bit. As you can see in the picture above, which was taken after taking off all the branches. It was somewhat heavy, but the gym is paying off.
I got it cleaned with good old alcohol, and then propolis to seal the little bleeding. It wasn't too much. I protected it with a bandaid stuff thing, and the next day I could take it all off. All good.
The wood stack looks quite different now than it did a week ago:
So does the compost. I had topped it with dirt in between, but with all the new green parts from the tree, I just threw them on there, too.
6 days ago:
Sunday:
Today:
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So, that's it. Another garden post. I've gotten a lot of compliments about it being lighter, cleaner, more organized and such. And the flowers and other plants are coming along great. It will be jungle on the walls, soon.
Thank you all for reading! Have a good night!
