Life has certainly been hectic in the last 2 weeks as my parents went on holiday to Austria and London and left me in charge of the lot!! This means as well as keeping the busines going by organising the work and staff I have to look after their small holding as well as my own. This means feeding several horses, chickens, dogs, pigs, 23 piglets and 2 rabbits before I even start to think about getting to work on time. Then it is the same thing in reverse when we get home plus mucking out, filling waters and walking the dogs before I get any chance of having my tea!! By the time I have done all this after a day’s work and picked up the phone messages, checked the emails and organised the following day’s work, I only have time to get a bath and fall into bed before starting again.
Tree surgery work has also been busy lately – normally once the birds start nesting in the trees we do not do much chainsaw work so that we do not desturb them. We have had to take down some dangerous trees overhanging the road in Durham but fortunately they had no nests in them. We also had to get a tree preservation order overturned for one customer as the roots were causing serious structural damage to his house. We recently pruned back a willow tree with a virus in Spennymoor, which hopefully we will be able to save as it is a lovely mature tree which the owner is quite fond of!! We always try to save as many trees as we can and make it a priority to improve the locations we are working at as forestry in general used to have a very bad reputation for being destructive and we like to think Woodland Enterprises is the opposite of that.