About a decade and a half ago I knew an electrician who used to have a favourite saying: “Builders bog hides a multitude of evils” he used to say to me. Whilst that sentiment sounds a bit dodgy, he was actually talking about hiding all the rough edges, cables and pipes etc. in house construction by applying copious quantities of plaster and/or other products used by builders these days.

Every now and then I get a bit excited and tackle a major disappearing act here at the farm. This week included one of those acts. Before we go any further though, a bit of history is necessary. Many years and also many owners ago, this farm which just happens to be in the middle of a Eucalyptus obliqua forest, was logged for timber. Unfortunately for me, historically, the people logging the forests usually never considered completely removing the dead tree stumps. It is not hard to understand why that happened though. The timber is just soooo hard!
To add insult to injury, somehow or other those tree stumps were generally burnt which has the effect of killing them, otherwise they’d produce coppiced branches from that stump. As a fun fact, most Eucalyptus trees can be cut down to the ground 6 times and they will still regrow from that stump (i.e. That is what coppicing means). How hardy is that?

Here however, for some strange reason the stumps have been mostly burnt either deliberately or through a bushfire – it matters not. It actually really doesn’t make any difference because the tree stump is simply dead. The burning process on the other hand acts like a preserving agent and those tree stumps don’t rot and thus return to the soil. There are logs on the ground here which still show the impacts of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires which tore through this farm.

So there has been this dead tree stump near the chicken enclosure which has been taunting me for years.

Every time - for years now - that I’ve been supervising the chicken’s daily activities as they all happily scratch around in the shady orchard, this tree stump has been taunting me. The tree stump just dares me to take action.

This week and to its ultimate demise, I took serious action. After about two and a half hours of work with the chainsaw but mostly with the axe, I can honestly say that the stump has now met its final demise. That’ll teach it for taunting me! The disappearing act was completed by smoothing the ground out and back filling the area with material taken from the deep litter in the chickens enclosure. Hard work!

The rest of the blog post, photos and video can be found here: http://ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au/