trees

I have had some requests to keep this one going so I will try and keep the local stuff going on here and post more general info on the valdovino blog.

A law was made a couple of years ago regulating eucalyptus and conifer trees, it has new been modified and the result is that none of either are allowed within 50 meters of the perimeter of land with a house on it. Jolly good we can ask the Junta to ask the owners of adjacent land to chop down the huge trees that pose a hazard should they fall in another great wind or should we get a forest fire sweeping through here. The law is not implemented very well it seems and there are still a lot of properties still surrounded by trees, I guess partly because of the low price of timber just now and partly because people make their living from these crops and want to hang on to it as long as they can. We have a strip of fairly young Eucalyptus on our land that we were planning to use as a sustainable source of biomass. If we ask for adjacent trees to be cut we will also have to cut our own trees. A time limit for complience of around 2 months will be imposed and I will have to spend a lot of time playing with my new chainsaw or the Junta will send men to cut the trees for us and we will be charged and fined for non compliance. If we don't cut our trees our home insurance would not pay up in the event of a fire damaging the property. There are many hundreds of trees of varying sizes - I think there is enough wood to heat our house for about 14 year however cut timber does not store for that long and it would be a rather large pile and many months of wielding an axe to chop it to manageable burning  bits. Neighbors whose trees are far enough away for us to feel they are not a hazard will also have to cut theirs, some of these are not really mature enough to be worth selling and wood is just not selling just now either so there might be some bad feeling created hmm but then it is a criminal offence for them to grow their trees that close - what do we do ? Well we know what we must do its just a case of how soon do we do it really.