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Gardening with an axe

Our marvellous landlord (Shane) visited today and officially started the wet season by attempting to do some gardening with a 5-kilo-ish axe. He had about half an hour before the weather got the hint, and managed to weight-loss the tree in question by about 100kg in that time, plus get it dragged and stacked out in the front yard for Council pickup.

Shane then had lunch, which put said weather off-stride, then returned and completed the job in the dry — to the complete fascination of our littlest girl.

Shane’s early-teen son did a very efficiant and neat job of “tidying” then exporting (wheelbarrowing) the smaller sections of tree with a 2-3kg axe at the same time. Small Sir, watching from the balcony, was definitely impressed by the speed and neatness of Master Early-Teen’s mission. Note to self: no axes in Small Sir’s or Small Madam’s sight/reach until after real training has happened for each (and for me as well, come to consider things — ’s been a few years now since I hefted one earnestly, and then there’s the recent-ish head and other damage).

Comments

Leon RJ Brooks said…
Oh, and if you want to see heavy... then a “small” weeping willow tree would be a good place to start. Brother-in-law James G-E got given one – about six feet tall implanted — and the skinny, innocuous little ≈2m shrub must way well clear of 100kg.

Assisting (1 in 5 adults) in lugging the unruly, unstable thing out of a trailer drove a very pretty, reserved (kinda) and decorous lass to swear outright in front of me (several events, all English because Deutsch was apparently not flavoursome enough) for the first time(s) ever in well past a decade – and another pretty, very polite & thoughtful lass in this team to the absolute brink of following suit.

It’s not (quite) Jarrah, and Wandoo it is most definitely not (Wandoo is pretty much the closest thing to natural grown high-density steel which I know of in Australia — at least twice as dense as Jarrah, plus many times harder), but it does have a unique section of the abuse-athon firmly set aside for itself now.

I also ran across an unusual piece of reasoning, en passant. A core principle in biological evolution is that the rank of most successful variant (or whatever) is awarded by head-count. Australian evolution people, if they believe the theory as practiced in real life, must therefore adopt the leading philosophical viewpoint apparently shared by over 12 million fellow Australians: Christianity.

I expect at least occasional, [umm...] ongoing adaptation issues, including consequential coronary disorders amongst both teams. ⌣
29 April, 2006 13:21
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