If you have a tractor and you live in timber, you may be tempted to take out a dead tree with the loader bucket. That's not a good idea and I talk about the danger in this video.

Our house is next to a wooded area and back four or five years ago we had a pretty severe drought and several of them died. They've been gradually losing limbs and I was out brush hogging under them one day and thought that maybe a couple of them had gotten rotten enough that they could be pushed over with a loader bucket.

Trying to do a task like that is a bad idea and I recommend you DON'T try it, but I hate to admit, I did. When the tree in the video didn't move, I realized that I'd have to pay someone to cut the tree down safely, and when a group of guys, employed by the local electric cooperative, were cutting under their power lines near here, I asked if any of them did tree removal. Usually in a crew like that there's one guy who cuts trees for a living, and when I asked if anyone would like to cut a few trees down to make extra money, there was a volunteer.

He showed up a couple of Saturday's ago, laid the trees on the ground in no time without incident, I paid him, he was happy and I was happy and glad not to be in intensive care.

My family would not be characterized as timber people. Growing up we had a fireplace and I used to help dad gather firewood. He would usually cut down mediumsized trees that had recently died and that's what we'd burn. I'd like to brag on how good a woodsman my father was, but once he cut a tree down on the tractor, one time he almost dropped a tree on the dog, and another time he cut a really small tree down and it fell right on top of him. No one was hurt in any of those incidents, but the point is, I was trained on how to cut down a tree by someone who wasn't very good at it, so I don't trust my abilities. The guy from the tree service cuts them down all the time and charged me $200 for cutting down nine trees, which took a little less than 2 hours for him. The cost of my medical care if any of those trees would have fallen on me (or possibly my funeral) would have been a lot more than a couple hundred bucks so I was glad to pay it. I'll move the trees around this winter when the ticks and chiggers are gone.

The other thing I discuss in the video is how hard it is to dig out a stump with a backhoe. It can be done, it's just a lot bigger job than most people think. If you want to see what I mean, watch this:    • Stubborn Stump   and then this, which is Part II:    • Stubborn Stump 2nd Part  .

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