Fall Cleanup

Our yard has 4 large trees. Each fall there are a TON of leaves that need to be raked up. Over the summer, the electric department had some tree trimmers come to cut back some limbs of a few of the trees that were close to the electric lines. Once they were done mutilating the trees, our poor trees looked horrible and sunlight was coming through in parts of where our yard had not seen sun in a long time. I decided at that point that I would just rather take them out completely and put in a bigger garden area than what we have. Jeremy and Mikkele had a different plan that included a dog and a dog run going in place of the trees. I think we'll compromise and make both fit. I told Jeremy that we needed to get the trees down before all the leaves fell so we only had 2 trees full of leaves to clean up instead of 4. Well that was a great idea, and the process was started before they fell, but it took a few Saturday's to get it all done because of weather and Jeremy being on call 24/7. And what a mess it turned out to be. But it all has been cleaned up and ready for winter-minus the stumps they still need to be taken out, and we have a ton of firewood that we'll be able to use in a year or so once the wood dries out. More work will need to be done in the spring to get my garden area ready. I'm pretty excited to have a bigger garden this next year though.

Jeremy had a little bit of a Tim Taylor power trip as he was using the chain saw.

It was a whole family affair to get the yard cleaned up. We even recruited some friends and neighbors. :)

Never too young to put them to work right?

And of course you have to play in the leaves a bit. That makes the clean up part worth it. (And that's why the neighbor kids come to help :))

Grant even got in on "jumping" into the leaves. He didn't love it when big sister threw some leaves on him though.