HAMADRYAD

Ok folks,

 

I’ll need your special attention here…

There were some huge trees around the construction area that needed to be chopped down.. they were a potential danger to the house as they were bending over very steep and some of them were ill…

As they are of the “Pinus” family and so they aren’t autochthonal, they need to make space for the authentic Belgian trees anyway. Nevertheless we chopped down only a minimum of trees.

What’s so special about this?

Well.. when I was living in Zottegem, I had a housemate, Wouter, previously referred to as ‘The treeman”, who is actually an expert in everything that has to do with trees.

He is one of the few certificated treeworkers in Belgium! And, boy, is he good !!!

Not only he has the gift of being very precisely and accurate with his estimations and way of work, he also has the unique position of using tools that are very rare in Europe, but also VERRRRY handy !!!

As I’m fond of nature I don’t like my other trees to get wasted during the process… I also don’t like big machines running down my ground, ruining all plants and compacting the earth, leaving no air for new life. That’s why I knew I had to ask Wouter for the job!

First I asked Wouter, who is the founder of Vartago (http://www.vartago.com), for some advice. He took a look around and could tell exactly which trees were Ill or weren’t that stable anymore. He investigated the way he could chopp the “bad” trees without leaving any trace on the rest of the forest and before I knew he was climbing like a monkey in the trees to chopp of the major branches before taking down the top of the tree.

He was able to target the huge pieces of wood so correctly that after a while we were making  bets about it. He told me to put a stick in the ground where he thought the wood would fall and everytime it fell right on top! I was even more impressed when he was able to take down a full tree and make it land exactly where he wanted it to land.. If you would have been there, it’s sure you wouldn’t have believed your own eyes !!!

 

The whole process of chopping down the trees, cleaning the ground and putting the huge pieces of tree, one on top of the other, only took a few hours! All thanks to his great efficiency and his unique tools…

 

I’ll leave the rest of the talk to the pictures I took…

 

 

 Here you see Wouter using one of his incredible tools. Vartago is the only importer of these tools… In dutch they are called “Boomezels” which would translate to “Treedonkeys”. They are abling you to lift a huge tree without any effort and you can transport them wherever you want… it’s so easy that you might ask yourself “What have we been doing all this time without those donkeys???”

 

Here is another one… as you can see there are different models for different purposes… you can hang them behind your jeep,  quad or just pull them by hand…

By lifting the trees and using big soft wheels there is no damage done to the ground what-so-ever!

When it’s too difficult to use wheels, Wouter uses a special power winch to pull the trees to an open spot. Again to diminish the damage on the ground he uses a special tool: some kind of head he pulls over the tree!

 

Here’s the winch pulling the tree:

 The special thing about this winch is that it uses no fixed rope.. You can just put in a general static climbing rope of any lenght and pull it all the way through. Another handy thing about it is the way you operate it: You just pull the rope and it enlarges the power you put into it… if you pull strong it will pull strong on the tree.. if you pull slow it will make the tree go slower.. this gives you an excellent control over the machine. And above all it is lightweight, so you can take it anywhere!

 

Well… as you can see I’m very surprised and full of admiration for Wouter and he’s company.. and I can only advise you to give him a ring when you need to chop a tree, take care of ill trees, get some professional advise on trees or if you want to buy he’s awsome tools!

Just check out he’s web at www.Vartago.com  !!!

 

Greetings !!!!

 

 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Building the house, Getting started. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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