Some tasks aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Sometimes things have to be done in a certain sequence; you can’t do one thing until something else is done first, and sometimes the chain of things that have to be done goes back a ways.

We ran out of firewood this winter. Also, the trees on the east side of the house are getting tall enough that they’re beginning to block our view. So it seemed like a good time to start cutting a bunch of trees. One thing led to another, and I had about five trees down. Now that we have a chipper, I planned to use that to make mulch to put on the path I use when I walk Zeke and Lucy around the house.

You can see the how the trees are blocking the view to the east. On the lower left you can see a little bit of the trees I have cut.

I learned a few years ago that I need to take care of the trees as I cut them rather than cutting a bunch of trees and then cleaning up. I once cut a large number of trees and ended up with a disaster area that took a couple of years to finally clean up. From now on I clean up as I go.

So, I intended to chip the limbs for the path right away, but first I needed to do some work on the path. I had been intending to level out the path where it leads from the back of the house around to the east into the leach field, but a lot of other things were higher on the priority list. So now I had a bunch of trees with a bunch of limbs to chip, but the path wasn’t ready for the chips. Before I could chip the limbs, I had to level out the path.

It’s easy enough in principle. All I needed to do was cut into the slope on the uphill side and dump the dirt onto the lower side. But when I cut into the slope, I needed material for a low retaining wall. So I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for garden wall blocks. I got 40 blocks, which is not enough.

Here’s the work in progress. The little line of blocks on the left took care of the 40 blocks I got.

As I worked up towards the back of the house I realized I needed to finish the retaining wall at the corner of the house that I started a little while ago. Make that a few years ago. It’s made of landscape timbers. Here’s the view down from the deck. The landscape timber on the left is part of the existing wall. The three others were left over from some work I did in the front of the yard.

Today I got the landscape timber retaining wall finished and backfilled. Now I can restart on leveling the path, and then I can get about 80 to 100 more garden wall blocks and make the low retaining wall along the path. And then, after touching up the level of the path, I can bring the chipper around and start chipping the limbs.And then I can cut some more trees.

Unless I run into another chore that needs to be done first.