When we positioned the house, we set it just to the west of the beautiful long-needle pine. Off center, of course, because everything in my world is slightly off center. So there sat house and tree in what would evolve into the Bent Pine Farm Tea Garden in our first three years.
We sailed through a couple of tropical storms, hardly worth mentioning. No hard-nose hurricanes for this piece of the peninsula! But, statistically, how long can your luck hold out? So, in Aug we braced for Hermoine, which struck the area as a category 1 storm, taking out power for a couple of days. And even more telling, cracking a couple of very large branches off my beautiful front yard pine.
The pine branches that broke in Hermoine were an indication that long needle pines are much more brittle than the Sand Pines. A long needle pine standing that close to the house would most certainly split, crack apart and go straight through the roof. Would we be sadder to lose our front yard pine or deal with a gaping hole in the roof, or worse?
So, ‘The Tree’ became the ‘Long Needle Pine That Had to Go’. The good news is that I made a deal. Traded the pine tree for a full length screened porch on the front of the house! (The long needle pine would have had to come down anyway!) I’ll let you know how it goes.
Happy Homesteading,
T.
P.S. Hurricane Irma hit us in the wee hours of Monday September 11, 2017 as a Category 2 hurricane, sustained winds of 110 mph. We sat out the storm in one of our Florida Engineered out-buildings (that means it has hurricane tie downs and rafters built with 2x6s). The building never moved an inch!
