Off Grid Cabin Project Episode 2 | Tree Trimming & Trail Building

Okay, come on up here, cameraman, I'll show you. Okay, guys, this is a steel combi system. And so this is like around my place where we have so much maintenance to do. We have tons of decorative bushes, we have trails to maintain, we have trees to keep trimmed. This combi, you can put in all kinds of attachments. Like what we're gonna be using today is a little chainsaw attachment, but I have trimming attachments, I have string trimmer attachments. It's just really great, okay? And so how it works is you just put it together based on how much length you need. Now, I'm gonna be trimming a pretty tall tree, so I'm gonna take and put an extension on here. So you just kind of wiggle this extension down in here, tighten it up, put whichever attachment that you're using on, and now you're ready to go. This thing's really like long and I'm gonna be able to get up in here and trim what I need to trim. Now, if you'll back up a little bit, cameraman. So the problem that I'm having is like this tree, which is an awesome tree, but this low growth makes it so that, well, number one, all these leaves and acorns and stuff get on my deck, makes a mess. But number two, it keeps it shady, and so it holds a lot of moisture on the deck. It impedes airflow and it impedes sunshine. So my idea is, is I'm gonna trim off a little bit of these low hanging branches, okay, from here. So I keep a little bit of a canopy effect and I'm gonna trim up some of these limbs all the way up another, say, two sections so that as this top growth comes out, I can still get like a lot of shade, but it'll be from the top. I'll have unimpeded air flow through here and then from the road, it'll be very aesthetically pleasing. Now, whenever you're trimming something, you have to be very careful because you can't put anything back on. So our general idea is we cut a little bit and see what it looks like, then we cut a little bit more, okay? And so that's kind of what we're gonna do here. I'm gonna use a loppers to trim off this. And then when you're trimming your limbs, it kind of takes weight off and your limbs will rise up. So always trim your kind of like low-hanging fruit, as I guess you could call it, first, and then work towards your bigger things. Okay, so right off the bat, I'm just gonna come in here, do a little lopping, and that's gonna, you'll notice every time I lop something off, this limb will pop up just a little bit. And always when you're in the shade, you're gonna have dead, you know, as the top limbs grow, it robs the bottom limbs of sunshine. And so that's where you'll get a lot of dead material. And always look, an old arborist told me, he said, look for the limbs where another limb is doing that same work. So you see this limb here, this limb's going out over it. So this limb's gonna end up dying anyway. So I can pull this down and hit it with my loppers, and I don't really lose anything, if that makes sense. See, but now as I lop that off, it looks like I'm creating this big hole here, but it's not that I'm creating that big hole so much, as I'm taking weight off of the branch, and the branch will pop up. So it's really neat. I mean, I don't know that much about tree trimming, but I have some friends that do, and I'm always all ears whenever they're around, because it's amazing how much better they can make a tree look with just a few placed, few well-placed cuts. Again, I'm gonna stick with the idea that less is more. So I'm just gonna trim some of this up, just to see what we're gonna be getting when we trim off the limb from the top. You see how that popped so high up there? Now, obviously, I'm not being very safe. I need to move this out of the way. That already looks completely different. Does it look different from back there, cameraman? Okay, now I think the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take, I'm gonna take some of this right here off, and we're gonna see what that does before I come back and revisit that section. So let me put my hearing protection on. Ah! Cut a little bit off at the top, so it doesn't fall on me. And you can see how that popped right up there. See that, cameraman? Isn't that cool? All right, so I'm gonna turn that off for a second and go back here and look, because I'm kind of surprised at exactly how much that popped up. Oh, and what I used to do when I first got this combi was I would just cut the whole limb off and then try to dodge out of the way. Well, that didn't work very good. Okay, now that opened it up quite a bit, cameraman. I'm almost thinking I can just kind of come back here along that deck side and trim that up. What do you think? Now, remember what I said I've learned over the years, not to get too carried away with your cutting, because you cannot put any back on. I'm gonna stop, go back here and take a look. Hopefully it's opened up my deck. I can get good airflow, and I haven't interfered with my overall framing effect. You know how that, whenever you look at a book and there's a cabin right in the woods, and then it seems to be framed by the foliage? That's what we're going for here. Let's back on up here, cameraman. Look and see. Might wanna switch to 0.5 for a second. Kind of go down that way where the sun's shining the other way. Maybe come down this way. Now, from this side, back on up over this way, I don't feel like we've lost anything in terms of framing. And then when we come around this way, I feel like we have a nice straight shot through here. And for a minute, I was thinking that I needed to keep this, but what I'm thinking now is that this right here, right, I don't need that because this up here is gonna do that job in a year or two. So I think I can take this whole limb off right here. And what I'll do is I'll take it off in a couple of sections. I'll take like here, here, and then I'll run a ladder up the tree and I'll take it off at the actual disease collar. So I think I'm gonna go ahead and trim this one up here, too. Let's step back and look. Now, hopefully what I have now, back on up there, cameraman. Hopefully what I have now is I have a nice unimpeded airflow, but I haven't lost any of the effect of the canopy of the trees. Hopefully I magnified it and I can take a look at it and I can come back in. And obviously what I don't want, this limb that's cut off, I don't wanna see that. So I'm gonna trace that limb all the way back to the trunk and cut it off at the disease collar. And then I'm gonna come in here. We have some dead here. I'm gonna cut this dead off and I'm probably gonna keep this limb here even though it's a little dirty on my roof because I can get up here with the blower and blow it off just because I like the way the tree comes over the back of the cabin there. It kind of swoops down, ties in with the other trees. Oh! Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Very nice. So something I just now thought about, like I just got stung by a yellow jacket. Y'all might be able to see where he was stuck in my arm. And what are those things you're supposed to have for people if they have anaphylactic, EpiPen? I'm way down here in the middle of nowhere. There's not an ambulance anywhere here close. I probably need to get an EpiPen. So if you guys out there can think of anything else I might need, make sure you put it in the comments section for somebody comes down here and something bad happens. Okay, so for everyone who thinks they like nature, nature's awful. I was just trying to weedy the path down into the creek and I stopped to lop some limbs off a tree to kind of create a little bit of a tunnel effect. And I lopped right into a whole nest of yellow jackets. And so now I'm eating up. And I was kind of making fun because I came out, I got stung by one yellow jacket and I was flexing like, look, I'm immune to yellow jackets. I went back in there, I stirred up the whole nest. Now I'm ate up my whole legs, all the way up my legs and both my arms. I've been stung like 20 times. And my dogs, they had yellow jackets stuck all over them. They were rolling around, freaking out. The cameraman didn't get it because she took off running, right? But look, nature's awful. I'm fixing to weedy to nature right out of this situation. Okay, so like I said, this is my secondary choice for an entry into the creek, right? But you've seen that channel on Instagram, like nature is metal. It is, like you don't want any part of nature. So I've come down here a few hundred yards from the other spot. So I can get my little path into the creek. And I'm completely seeding control of the upper portion of the creek until winter. Like at winter time, I think the yellow jackets will be like on a hiatus and I'll be able to retake that ground. But until then, like, ah, this is gonna be my area of operations. So what I'm gonna do is create, oh, nice little canopy effect. So I can get into the creek and it looks cool. This is what we're talking about. You know, you dress this up, you're young. You need some yellow jackets in this life. Just like this over here, that way. All right, look back here. It looks, see, the canopy effect. Always take off a little bit at a time. You always come back, take off a little more. But you can't put it back. Try to get rid of these sharp things. They're like, oh, people don't know how to use them. Walk around, these kind of areas. With the cameras, we go. All right, and just like that, I have me a nice little entry into the creek that's safe and free of yellow jackets. All right, let's get to adventuring.