Big Wind...and another tree down!

May 1, 2017:  We've had weird spring weather up until now, with lots of rain.  Today we had tornado warnings.  Not sure if we actually had a tornado, but we certainly had a terrific storm with torrential rain and winds that shook the window panes!  I screamed as I watched our remaining pine tree go down.  Amazingly it fell right between the garage and the shed. As bad as it seemed at the time, I couldn't have planned a better path for it to fall.

Ironically, we had hired someone to do some odd jobs around here, one of them being to jack up the northwest corner of the shed (old garage) which had been sinking year by year. Today was his first day of work.  He did quite a bit of work jacking up the building, but then left a bit early because of the tornado warning. As he was packing up to leave, I commented: "wouldn't it be ironic if...."!  That will teach me not to joke around!!   Thankfully the tree missed the shed (and Mike's repairs) and missed the garage as well.  It landed right where Mike's truck had been parked one hour earlier!  The falling tree took down the electric line from the house to the garage, and did a bit of damage where it pulled the connectors out of the wall.  The wind also took the cupola off the top of the garage (not noticed until afterwards) and some roofing shingles off both the garage and the shed, as well as one of my greenhouse toppers.

Photos of the downed tree:  

Not more than 20-30 minutes later, Nephew George passed by with his logging truck, saw our tree was down and pulled in to help us out.  With his saw he cut the tree into thirds and with his crane he loaded the pieces onto his logging truck and took then away for us.  Within an hour he came back with a saw and cut the remaining tree down to the stump! I wanted to post a video I took picking up that tree and putting it on his truck, but for whatever reason, I can't get the videos from my iPhone to post here or otherwise (may not be compatible with Blogger?)

Additional damages:  We lost the cupola that had been on the top of the garage.  But we've decided not to replace it:

And shingles from the garage and shed:

(a few days later we had someone come in to 

re-shingle the entire garage and shed!)

Sunset after the storm:

May 23, 2017

George showed up with his truck again this evening with his cool crane-truck, the same truck he took the entire tree away with three weeks ago!  He pulled the stump right up out of the ground.  I didn't expect that, and luckily had not yet called our tree guy to come take out the stump!  Now all we have to do is remove the pieces and fill in the hole!   Thanks, George!

June....

I had previously ordered some new trees to plant where the pines had come down, bareroot trees that don't look like much when they arrive.  And here they are after planting: a Red Maple, a Pink Dogwood, an Eastern Redbud and a Washington Hawthorne. They don't look like much yet, but we'll see how they progress...! 

Well, now I see I didn't take a photo of the Hawthorne, but since none of the four trees are in any way distinguishable from each other right now, you get the idea...!

Red Maple

Pink Dogwood 

Redbud

Stay tuned....!

June 15, 2017:  Now, a little more than two weeks after planting, 3 of my 4 little trees are starting to leaf out.  I'm still waiting on the Hawthorne to show some signs of life, but the other 3 are looking good!

Red Maple

Redbud

Dogwood