in which I become a logger

When in Rome, right? I'm currently engaged in chopping down trees. It seems that's all I'm about lately. Pretty soon, the Eugene green mafia will be picketing at my door.

I discovered that the wild plum tree that had grown up inside my quince bush was not one but several trees, as thick as my wrist and about 10 feet high. Someone had already cut out some of them and they grew back, so I'm going to have to stay vigilant and pull out the suckers that will continue to grow. I can't kill the stumps because they are too entrenched in the quince. What made the job particularly fun was the thorns that grow on quince branches. Who knew?

Because the pile of brush on my lawn wasn't large enough, I decided to chop large branches off my European white birch tree. The tree is really messy, and it branches over the driveway next to my front door has led to months of tracking in debris and bird crap on the cars. It lost its little leaves in the fall, then promptly formed thousands of catakins, which fly in the wind like confetti (you can see some in the recycling bin in the first picture). I could tolerate the debris if it were just for a few weeks, but the tree has been making a mess since October, before we moved in, and the catakin confetti doesn't want to leave the driveway, even if we sweep up mounds of it. It gets wet and sticks to the pavement like mud.

So I decided to remove some of the branches, or rather, have my people (read: Mr. Reluctant, the best husband ever) remove the branches. It's not really a good idea to prune a birch in the spring, since it drips sap and attracts borers, but I saw that some of the branches had wounds and others (like the one that crosses the middle of the two trunks in the second image), had cracks in them that weakened the limbs already. And I'm tired of finding birch confetti in my hair and dishwasher.

Now it's just a matter of getting rid of the wood. I saved some straight branches for garden use, but I'm not sure what to do with the bigger logs. I guess I could dry them and burn them, but would the moss/lichens growing on them affect us? I don't want a bunch of black smoke in my living room. Maybe I could use them as campfire wood.