Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

 I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.

That's where the branch snapped off.

Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. 

Apologies to Joyce Kilmer.

Life in the Urban Forest.

I wish that he'd made one of mine a little bit better.

This is another reason that I can't get any work done on my cars!

My house is surrounded by mature trees, of all kinds.

The green strip in front is home to a massive messy, over grown specimen that drops seed pods all through the year. It is huge, towering over the street lamps. 

These were originally planted around the entire cul de sac, my neighbors on the east side of the court, that were there, back in the day, cut them all down before they grew too large and never replanted anything in their place. 

It 's true that they provide a lot of shade, but the branches spread over my driveway, almost all the way to the porch roof. 

The City actually came out once and trimmed them all quite well. That was twenty years ago, they haven't been back since. That was year that the City had a surplus.

Did I mention that they make a horrible mess? 

In the front yard, which blends with my neighbor's, we've  got  two Chinese Elms, two olive trees and there's a redwood in the front  side yard. 

In back I've got an impressive row of five redwoods along the west fence line. another olive in the right n/e  corner. Next to the inside gate I've got another redwood.

Two of my redwoods grew from seeds. The one in the front side yard and the one next to the gate. I had trimmed the rear trees and left piles of cuttings in those spots until I could dispose of them. Seeds fell from the pods and took root, now there are two beautiful trees there. It only took a bit less than thirty years. 

By the south fence line there used to be two pines, now deceased. they fell down in a storm and were cut up and carted off. 

There were three fruit tress along the south side if the house, now only the cherry remains. 

I like these trees, they are one of the things that attracted me to the house. 

Except for the Eucalyptus that is in the s/w corner of the yard,

I was excited and proud to have a yard that looks like a park.

That was over thirty five years ago.

My trees are more than mature, they are pretty darn old, That Eucalyptus was already pretty big when we moved in. I will admit that I never tried to trim it until it was too late. When I was a youngster in my 30's, I thought nothing of climbing a ladder with a pruning saw. Those days are gone. 

A bit of a mess.

The Eucalyptus had two trunks splayed as a "V'. One very stormy night over twenty years ago we heard a mighty crack, and in the morning found that the Eucalyptus had decided to split in the middle. I managed to cut it up and cart it off myself, but I didn't trim the other trunk. 

The tree grew into an odd, gnarly looking, twisted mess with branches sticking out at all angles. It became overgrown with ivy, that almost killed it. It remained in that state for many years. Before we had our shed built, I decided to trim and clean it up. I climbed as high as I could and cut and stripped the ivy from the tree. 

I did some trimming, of what I could reach. It was now way too tall. The top of the tree was left free to grow. I wasn't too worried, I imagined that it would stop growing at some point.

It didn't. 

After the shed was built my Daughter thought that the enclosed space behind the shed would be a great place to put a table and some chairs, kind of an out door room. 

This was after my earlier experience with a severely overgrown Oleander tree/bush. That was the one that fell in another storm, pretty much filling up all my yard space. I reported on my struggle with that tree several years ago in this blog. 

She was scouting the possibilities when there was a sudden loud whump! I looked over just in time to see a huge bunch of branches fall between the trunk and fence. Luckily my Daughter was not sitting in that space where she could have been hit by an errant branch. The bulk of the branch fell between the trunk and fence. A long bit of branch fell onto my neighbor's yard. 

Luckily they are empty nesters and there weren't any children in the yard and in harms way. A couple of days later I went to work.

I fired up the chainsaw, (plugged it into a long extension cord, actually) and did my best Paul Bunyan act. Another crisis solved, though I told my daughter to forget about using this space. Since it was behind the shed it was easy to forget about.

A little more than a year had passed.

This is what I found on my side of the fence.

My Daughter was rearranging items in our second shed late at night a couple of days ago. She came in and advised us that she'd heard a loud whooshing sound and thought that the tree had lost another branch. She wasn't kidding, a huge branch had fallen off straight down the main portion, landing in my west side neighbor's yard. It broke a section of fence and was about twenty feet into their yard. 

This is what fell in my neighbor's yard!

My yard is quite a bit higher than their's, and there is a retaining wall and a 15 ft. up slope. that is pretty much bare and not used for anything. They do have a young child, I often hear him playing in the yard. Their back lawn and play area was far enough from the fence that the kid would have been safe, but it would have scared him pretty bad.

The heaviest portion of the tree fell right next to the fence and since it happened at ten at night, there wasn't anyone out there who could have been hurt. But it's sobering thought.

We've had to face the facts, that tree is just too dangerous to leave as it is. We are going to have to have it severely trimmed. That's gonna cost some bucks!

Who knows what danger lurks in those boughs?

I like to do as much around the house as I can, but I'm a realist, I haven't tried to climb in a tree in a long time, that's why they have become so overgrown.

The plan was to drastically cut back the eucalyptus, all the way to first "V" about eight feet up. That's cutting off a lot, since the tree was over forty feet high! This was a huge job.

It takes a pro to do the job safely.

The front street tree is an even more enormous specimen. The tree hasn't been trimmed since the City did a little work on it over twenty years ago. One of the branches reached from the green strip to the roof of the front porch. Luckily this is a healthy tree that has never dropped any branches. That would have been disastrous.

Why all this discussion about those trees?

Well, they have become a priority. I had to get the yard squared away somewhat so that the tree guys could safely have access to the eucalyptus, which is located between our first shed and the fence. 

This is just part of the clean up that I handled.

Work, effort and worry, not to mention money. 

I got a good price, but the job cost me what I paid for my '96 Mustang. 

So things are being pushed back a bit. 

This is the start of the three piles of cuttings that I made.

The tree crew came out and did a great job, but it's going to take a while for the budget to recover.