Recycling Our Trees

We have found such strange things in our yard following Hurricane Dorian.  One of the most interesting was the neck and head of a good sized plastic giraffe.  We could never figure out from where it had come.

The most mysterious, however, was a still-strapped bundle of 10 x 10 treated pilings that looked like they had just come off a building supply truck.  The longest ones were twenty feet long and they were  bundled with an assortment of shorter lengths.  They still had red flags stapled to the end like they were properly marked as an over-length load on the truck.

Assorted pilings still in a bundle.

We checked with all the construction people on the island and with the people who do work like this and no one had lost any pilings or even had any similar to these.  Everyone finally decided that they had washed all the way from the mainland.  Now Jamie and Galen will have some free pilings to use just for getting them out of our yard...no easy task.

Many trees went down during the storm.  We lost five trees in our yard, one of which ended up on the neighbor’s house. As the trees are cut, they are ground into chips as this is the easiest way to dispose of them.

The usable version of a downed tree.

One of our needs is to replenish the ground itself where trenches were washed out in the yard and large amounts of soil were washed away in several places.  We keep saving the tree chippers a lot of work by asking for the chips instead of letting them be hauled away.  We can fill with them and make a new yard surface with them.  Then we will sow them with annual rye grass followed by permanent grass before next summer.  The pine and cedar chips disintegrate quickly and very soon you cannot tell that we did not do the repairs with dirt.  Now our trees are still with us instead of being cut and hauled away.

The cedar chips smell wonderful after the hurricane stink.

Recovery continues!