More wind!

 Storm Barbara blew though with a LOT of wind but no rain. We didn’t get much sleep with it whistling and banging round the house.

Yet more trees have been splatted, a couple on the drive, one by the stables and one on the road at the bottom. Fortunately (for us anyway) the neighbors cleared the one off the road so cars can pass, but we will have to go tomorrow and move what we can of the rest of it. The biggish root ball we might need to rely on either the mairie or the kind services of the neighbors again.

These on the drive are not very wide but quite tall. You can kind if make out that Doug is cutting the tops here. 

Some friends arrived to pick up some strawberry plants and kindly helped move branches while Doug cut them so we could get out to our French lesson a bit later!

Fortunately these missed the stables. Doug had taken off various branches in the year, so that helped.

Tree Cutting

In every storm we have been worrying that the large trees near the house might fall and crush the house or barn. They were too big for us to cut and too close to the house, so we had some experts in to do it. They were very efficient and cut down or pollarded five huge trees in one day. A cherry picker certainly made it easier, but one of them had to climb several of the trees to get tricky bits off. Scary stuff, high in a tree with a chain saw!

Before

Pine has gone

Ash has been pollarded too

They also cut down two more ash that you can't see clearly in the picture and a dead oak on the drive. The cows decided to rush towards that just as they nearly finished cutting, but we managed to avoid any of them being squashed! One of them was in heat, so they were all acting crazy.

It was expensive to have them clean up all the mess and would have cost more again than just the cutting, so we are now left with a huge mess to clean up!
But that is ok as at least the house and barn are safe.