Tree Removal for Fun and Profit
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 25 May 2005 18:16:07 GMT
I’m still recovering from this last weekend–we ripped a 60 foot maple tree out of our back yard. One of the tree’s three main trunks was rotting, and it’d been dropping branches onto our yard and fence for years. It had to go. The problem was that the tree was less then 10 feet from our fence, only 20 feet from our garage, our neighbor’s garage, and the road, and 25 feet from our house. The hard part was getting the tree down without destroying anything.
We mostly succeeded–our garage’s gutter has two little dings, and we cracked one panel of our fence, but we managed to reduce the tree down to a 4-5 foot wide stump. We hauled 5 pickup-loads of branches to the city’s yard cleanup station, and hauled 2 dumptruck-loads of logs and firewood to friends and family. We’re left with a small mound of branches and leaves, but we’ll be able to stuff that into our yard waste can over the next few weeks.
Next up, I need to rent a stump grinder and get rid of the stump. That’ll probably take a few hours–it’s a lot of stump. Once that’s done, we’ll be ready to level things out, add a bit more topsoil, and then re-plant our back yard. It’s been ailing for years–the combination of the tree’s shade, damage from my sister-in-law’s dogs, and neglect have reduced it to a sea of moss and dandelions.
I keep forgetting how much I enjoy large-scale yard work. It’s a nice counterpoint to the week’s computer work, plus it gives me an excuse to play around with heavy equipment every now and then. How can you argue with that?
