A hard day's work yesterday...

A hard day's work yesterday ... and I slept like the proverbial baby (my understanding is that the real babies don't actually sleep :).  The weather hear yesterday couldn't have been nicer for hard physical work: mostly sunny, temperatures in the low 60s, and a nice breeze.  I spent the day clearing out 30 years or so of dead wood from a clump of 60' high black willows.  About half the wood was on the ground; the other half was dead branches I cut down with a hand saw (the Felco F610 shown at right).  I also had some chainsaw work to do – once I got the bigger (4" to 10" diameter) branches on the ground, I used the chainsaw to saw them up into roughly 4' pieces to pile onto my tractor's fork for transport to my (now gigantic) brush pile).

I've used quite a few different pruning saws over the years, mainly those purchased at Home Depot or the like.  I don't think I ever paid more than about $25 for one of them, and I thought they were fine – but they didn't last long.  They either lost their sharpness, or the blade got bent on a push stroke, making the saw unusable.  Last year I did a lot of pruning, cleaning up the pines and spruces in the yard of our new house.  I went through three Home Depot pruning saws in a week (can you say "Frustrating!"?), and decided to try my dad's favorite brand of all things pruning: Felco.  It cost over $50 for the saw above.  What did I get for that?  Well, first of all, I'm still using that saw, even after lots and lots of pruning last year.  It's still sharp.  No matter what I've done to it, I haven't managed to bend its blade.  Best of all: the sawing effort is noticeably lower with this saw than with any other pruning saw I've owned, though I've no idea why.  It's yet another demonstration of the value of a quality tool...