Sunday, Jun 15, 2014 at 21:59
I've never forgotten an episode when I lived in a country town in the SE wheatbelt of W.A.
Two elderly bachelor brothers owned a
farm about 40kms away.
They had a
gate on the front track into the farmhouse, like nearly all farms - plus a few nice trees near the
gate and up the driveway.
They'd shut the
gate when they drove out, and stop to open it again when they came
home.
They'd been doing that for probably 50 yrs. Then one day, they came
home, it was a gusty day, and the old fella in the passenger
seat got out to open the
gate - and a big limb on one of those lovely trees tore off with a gust of wind, and nailed the old fella to the ground, right at his front
gate!! Talk about that thing with your name on it!
I guess he would have been
well advised to
check those trees pretty carefully on a regular basis, as it turned out.
A few years later, there was a big group of people watching football in their cars at the local sportsground - which contained a large number of huge old shady Salmon Gums.
Suddenly, with no warning, and with little wind, a huge limb fell off one of the Salmon Gums and crushed the roof of one of the cars!
The bloke sitting in the car was really badly injured, and the Shire has inspected all the trees regularly since that episode.
Salmon Gums are one of the worst for termite attack, the termites love them like they love Pine or Karri.
I've knocked over thousands of Salmon Gums in my bulldozing career and probably more than half were infested right through the centre with termites.
Often, a huge Salmon with a metre diameter trunk would snap off clean just above ground level just as I pushed on it.
It wasn't unusual to have a Salmon Gum snap in half and fall back on the dozer. Thank God for solid tree canopies.
You're a fool to mess with trees above 3M high if you don't have a decent canopy on your machine.
Lemon-scented Gums and Redgums are two of the best-known dangerous trees for limb-shedding.
Always
check in any
fork in a tree to see if it's been holding rainwater and encouraging dry rot and termites.
Termites need water regularly, and if the tree has a
pool of water in a
fork, that will provide them with water as it percolates into the pith of the tree - which is quite often where the termites like to start from.
If the termites start from the centre and eat outwards, that then becomes a dangerous tree.
If it's a tough wood, the ants will often chew the outside and leave the centre, leaving the tree basically solid.
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