The Tennessee Chainsaw Massacre

Look what I just bought.....yep I now own a chainsaw. Never thought I'd ever need a chainsaw, but I do. On our property (it's still funny to say that....our property.....) there are 10 trees. Said Trees spew leaves like a hose during the Fall. To deal with the amount of leaves, we have built a mulch box. Three of the trees are a variety of hedge that was allowed to grow taller than they should have. These are partially evergreen....which means that they are always losing their leaves.....constantly. They are also not real pretty trees, and one is right next to the house (can we say I have to clean that particular rain gutter alot.) We've been wanting to get rid of them, but I could not forsee myself with a bow saw cutting down three trees in one weekend.....maybe one tree and I'd be exhausted afterwards.....so it was decided that we could do one of two things: 1. keep asking my Father-in-law (who's almost 70) to drag his butt down to our house with his chainsaw (he lives about an hour away) or
2. Get our own freaking chainsaw.

Look at the picture...isn't it lovely??? I will now hang it in my shed alongside our weed whacker, leaf blower and electric hedge trimmer. We opted for an electric one because I hate gas outdoor tools. My weed whacker is electric and does just fine, the hedge trimmer as well as the leaf blower are electric as well. The only gas outdoor tool I have is my push mower.....and gas mowers are better.......besides the electric chainsaw has enough horsepower and is lighter and easier to control than a gas one. Besides the three "hedge" trees, there is an evil crab apple tree. It blooms very pretty, but once the blooms are gone, you get these little apples that aren't really edible, they fall and get squished, etc which attracts lots of bees......and this particular tree gets bag worms. They make large cocoons that look like a huge spiders egg sac......this particular batch was ginormous. The entire tree was crawling with bag worms. They look like those fuzzy caterpillers that used to be prevelant in California when I was a kid only smaller......that tree will be the first to taste the chainsaw of retribution!!! In it's place we are going to be planting some Thompson seedless grapes and some blueberries. The next tree to go is a sad one. In Tennessee there is a variety of tree called "Redbud" because of the bright pinkish red blooms that sprout from it during the spring. They are nice trees that grow anywhere (you can see some along I-40 growing out of rocks....) but this one in our yard, like its bretheren that died last year, is destined to be put down. It's not blooming all that well anymore, there are hardly any leaves on it....it's a dead tree. Time to hack it down before it falls down. The good thing though, they have seed pods that drift around, and there are a number of redbud saplings growing in our planter boxes.......just stick a new one on the stump of the old and it will grow. They grow fast too.