Avoiding Two Disasters

The locust trees in the yard are all old.  The kind of old that causes bark to flake off and shelf fungus to grow and pileated woodpeckers to drill holes you could stick your arm into.  The kind of old that makes them fragile and subject to literally falling apart with little provocation.

Two weeks ago on a mildly breezy day the whole top of the middle tree snapped out.  Miraculously, it didn't hit the power line or the house.  More terrifying though was the fact that it fell right in the path to the barn which Andy had just walked up literally two minutes prior.  Yeah, a shaky 'oh my gawd' type of moment. Not just luck - clearly a warning.   

The tree closest to the road was truly half dead and shedding small branches if you so much as gave it a stern look. We (OK, mostly Andy) had been fretting about the real possibility of any of them coming down on the house or at least tearing the electric entry cable off the exterior wall.  With this near miss I quickly vaulted onto the bandwagon and decided they needed to come down.  Normally Andy can drop a tree without much difficulty but these three were problems - all fragile, all very tall, all within reach of the house and various power lines.  Seriously, what do you do with this?

So, we contacted a local tree removal company to assess them and take them down.  I was really sad about it, especially the one furthest from the road since it seemed sturdy but I was kind of ignoring the big seam between the main trunks and the fact that it could pretty much destroy Andy's shop, the breezeway and the back half of the house.

Saturday they arrived bright and early and as we walked around them again to formulate a game plan we modified the task - we would only take off the tops of the two trees closest to the house and leave the understory branches that couldn't hurt anything if they broke off.  (Sorry about the following pictures - apparently I had a smudge of lanolin on the phone lens - how could that happen?)

It was actually very interesting to watch and the man was very nice and didn't think I was silly to want to save some of the tree if possible.  Apparently lots of people are attached to their yard trees, even having him leave bare trunks standing so that looking out the windows one feels like the tree is still there.  (I don't think I'd go that far if I couldn't have greenery but I was going to have him cut high enough that the trunks would still function as clothesline poles!)  He maneuvered the bucket carefully to nip off branches in a certain order until the tree was down to the size we wanted.



The tree nearest the road was the most fragile but nothing went awry and not so much as a leaf touched the power line.


Andy can cut down the stubby trunk the rest of the way now that it can't hit anything no matter which way it falls.  The upper two trees still have enough branches to give shade to the picnic tables and give the winter birds somewhere to hang out on their way to and from the bird feeders.  Plus we can still hear the wind rustle the leaves out our bedroom window which is nice.  I must admit that I'll be happy if the trimmed trees are less attractive to the stupid birds that make me rewash the laundry!  Grr.

Turns out we were very sensible to have them taken down.  This is one of the big "healthy" sections of trunk.  The light color wood was live but the darker center area was spongy and not doing much of anything to provide strength or stability.  Yikes!

So now the house and inhabitants are safe.  Better to have a colossal mess to clean up than a colossal reconstruction job!