Our trees ( part 1)

 fall 2010

When we moved into our home 19 years ago our yard was quite barren. There was  thin grass in the front with two bushes on each side of the bay window and a little grass on the side of the house. The rest of the yard was comprised of alfalpha and weeds with  lots of stickers.  Also due to the lack of trees in the neighborhood there were no birds. Our cat "Slippers" came in one night covered in stickers. It took Joseph and I over an hour to remove them all from his fur. We have spent alot of time in our yard planting fruit and shade trees, flowers, berries as well as attempting to grow a garden in the clay soil that we have been working to improve over the years.  Since we are at the bottom of a hill we wanted to have privacy as well as shade so we put in  a dozen poplar trees above the rocks, along the back fence line. Our little sticks, have now grown  into these 70 foot beauties that you can see in the background. We have lost a couple through the years and now there are 10.  We realized  in the last two years that the tree trunks were pushing against the fence, as well as starting to show signs of disease.  After last Decembers' huge windstorm, that took out hundreds of trees (mostly pines) over all of Davis County we realized that our trees were now more of a liablilty than an asset and that it would be best to take them out. So after much deliberation and hesitation, Joseph spent the summer cutting the lower branches off the trees, so that it would save time when we rented the boom-lift to take the top of trees down.  We have a house directly behind us and we definetly did not want a tree landing on their house or the vinyl fence  that separates their front yard from their back yard, so the first three trees had to be done very carefully.

This is a view of the tees after cutting the lower branches off.  You can see we hardly made a dent.

Joseph used an 18' ladder to reach as high as he could, even cutting from our neighbors side. They were very good about us going into there yard an doing what we needed to do.  He had one minor accident when one branch he cut, which had a rope around it so he could lower it carefully to the ground, didn't do what he wanted it to do.  It swung around and crushed his finger against the trunk, cutting an artery.  I ran him into the Dr. where they clamped the artery to get it to stop bleeding and then gave him four stitches. 

This is the first pile of branches that he trimmed off.  It took three truck loads to take them to the dump.  Our neighbor across the street from us has been very gracious in letting us borrow his truck for this project.  We thought this was a huge pile but this is small compared to the mess we now have in our backyard.  To be continued.......