Meet W.C. Fargo

Our new toy, dubbed W.C. (for wood chuck) Fargo. We picked it up a couple of weeks ago over in Bellville, a couple of hours drive east of here. It was a really nice drive, through the wildflowers and pine trees (yes, Texas has pine trees. These are loblolly pines.)

We loaded the tractor on the flatbed and took it over to the dealer so we could be sure all the attachments were adjusted correctly, which turned out to be a really good plan, as several things had to be adjusted. We set it up a few days later and went to work on the trimmings that had been waiting, and were really happy with the results. It's rather ironic that I was so enthusiastic about having property "with trees!!" and now we are putting so much energy into cutting them down! But only some of them . . .and the dead limbs.

The place had been rather neglected as far as regular pruning for a long time, so there's a lot to catch up on, both for the health of the trees and for fire prevention purposes. Here, you can see the setup with W.C. attached to the back of the tractor, and the chute feeding into the lawn tractor trailer.

We have the generator mounted in the other lawn tractor trailer (we have His and Hers lawn tractors) so one of us can run the chain saw or pruning saw to cut trimmings or to get them down to the right size to run through the chipper. In the background here you can see one of the older mesquites. They have long snaky limbs and very feathery foliage and are a joy to watch when the breezes blow.

We chipped some of the mesquite trimmings separately from other woods so we could save them for smoking. The results are a nice medium chip, great for smoking as well as for mulching flowerbeds. The whole process is a bit of work, but the chipper is going to be a real asset, as with frequent bans on burning there's no other way to get rid of the amount of wood we need to eliminate.