Goodbye Tree!

And so the Tree Saga continues. I've already grossed you out with the apparently graphic wasp pics taken a couple years ago in my front yard, so I won't post those again. On Wednesday morning the five man crew came (at 7:30am!) and started removing the horse chestnut tree in our yard. After three and a half hours of work (with one break to empty the chipper hopper) the 100 year old, 75 foot tall tree was gone. Here are some pictures from that morning. This first pic shows how our tree decided it was time to lose the leaves.

The guy in the lift cut off most of the limbs and the other four picked them up and fed them to the chipper. They blocked off more than half the street in order to take care of this tree!

When I took this pic it looked like there was snow falling from the tree...just the saw dust!

Our good neighbor took the majority of the trunk wood for fire wood. After the main leads were cut down, only the trunk stump remained. They used a chain saw that was three of four feet long to cut the stump down to the ground.

Once they got the stump cut down, they brought in the back hoe to lift the stump into the truck to haul away.


These last two pics are a look at why the tree needed to come down ( and why it had started coming down in pieces by itself!)


There were so many little critters crawling around in this mulch!


I am so divided about saying goodbye to this tree! It was such a nice big tree, giving so much shade and a nice semi-barrier between our yard and the street. But it also has those horrible "pokey things" (the seed husks were especially sharp with barbs--OUCH!), and in recent years it has dropped significant limbs (thankfully with no personal or property damage). It is nice not to have to worry about it with every wind that blows, and knowing that we won't have to deal with the leaves and pokies this fall is a relief. But it does feel like a hole has been ripped in our world. I suppose we will get used to it not being there eventually. Mimi and Buddy are very sad to lose their climbing area and "sitting place", but hopefully will love the new tree we plan to get just as much.