Big Trees

Well, we're at 29,910 page views, so this could well be my last post. It's time to hand over the keyboard to Dad.

The 21st comes and goes and the broody hen still sits on the eggs and the baby chicks still sit inside their egg shells (we hope). To keep from everyone getting bored, I decided to do a post about trees; specifically some of the huge trees we have growing on the property. The biggest is pictured in the first three pics on this blog-post, with the first showing Dad's 6 foot 1 inch frame (in yellow circle) for comparison. For fun we did that triangulation thing to estimate the height, where you hold an inch-marked pencil out half a yard from your eye and measure the tree height against the pencil, then factor up by how far away from the tree you are standing. In Dad's case he was 35 yards away and the tree a foot tall against the measuring stick, so this, the biggest tree on the plot is, we reckon 70 feet tall. The girth of this giant at 4 feet from the ground is 94 inches (7 feet 10 inches) or 238 cm.

The second picture shows these trees as seen from down in the allotment; the big fella is the one on the right of shot. Locally these tree are known by the tree surgeons etc as "Dale Trees" and many people try to tell you they are sitka spruces but we've looked them up in the book and run their features through an identification key and we think they are Black Spruce (Picea mariana). They grow all around here and all over Roscommon, Lietrim and other counties and they all seem to have been planted at roughly the same time, starting maybe in the the 30's and 40's so perhaps some local forestry concern got hold of a job lot and they became a fashion.

Our 4th picture is of the trees along the 'Secret Garden' which we have mentioned before but not properly depicted. This was originally the veg garden and we know from talking to Vendor Anna that these were planted rather foolishly by her Dad (TK Max) as wind break saplings in about 1961. The Secret Garden has these up the inner west side with a nice row of beeches (showing Autumn colour in this shot) on the outside west, and some nice ash on the east, which may be coppiced for logs in a future Winter. These are the trees we'd like to have down but were going to be charged €1000 for the privilege by local tree surgeon and log splitter guy 'Oliver Splits'.

There you go.
We'll go back to excitedly watching over the broody hen for signs of eggs 'pipping'
Deefs