I think they broke my fence…
A few weeks ago I had a very large oak tree removed by a local landscaping company. This tree was quite large, of an unknown age, and had numerous small branches dying off unexpectedly. It turns out that this was due to the core of the tree rotting out but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Behold: The Tree
Well, one third of it at any rate
This tree had several annoying traits that I didn’t appreciate:
It provided a nesting spot for squirrels, a large one, and we constantly had multiple squirrels in the yard
It provided cover for squirrels, rats, rabbits, and chipmunks from aerial predators
It would shade out my garden for about five hours or so every single day
As the branches died off, they fell off in a large radius which included into the neighbors yard
It dropped acorns on a scale I could scarcely believe, which the squirrels thought was a great reason to immediately destroy my yard, garden beds, and planters. In the spring the reverse process would happen and they’d dig every single plant up looking for the acorns, which is how they managed to kill off 40+ strawberry plants this year along with a host of others
So we had it removed. As they were cutting into the trunk the entire core of the tree separated from the rest of the trunk which caused some problems that the landscape crew had to work through, that is when they informed me that it was a good thing that the tree was coming down now because it would have likely come down soon either way.
This is my favorite progress picture, mainly due to how stupid the tree looks
All that I was left with was this bit of wood, which I cut into smaller pieces so that a friend of mine can burn it after it has a chance to season properly.
These were longer than they look
Then the stump grinding guy was sent over. He did his job thoroughly and turned the area that the tree used to reside into a crater. While he was there I was fiddling about in the yard, which is when I noticed that one of my fence posts was crooked.
Pictured: A crater
The weather then turned very cold and then it rained for several days straight so I didn’t go outside to inspect things further. After the weather cleared the landscaping company came back out, dumped in a bunch of soil so that the crater could be leveled out, and put the fence back up. I was at work while this was going on and it was dark by the time I came home, so I didn’t see this until the next day.
This is my pair of raspberry rows, which clearly could have done better.
A few snapped wires here and there, nothing major. Wait a second, does that post at the far end of the bed look bent to you, or is that just leaning?
Snapped Wires
Oh dear, that doesn’t look good.
Well now I needed to confirm that they managed to bend a T-post, so I pulled it out. The fact that it just sort of popped out of the ground no problem was telling.
Yeah… that’s not how that’s supposed to look.
As you can see in the photo above, that post is bent somewhat significantly. I briefly considered just replacing it with one of my spare T-posts but I saw a very slick trellis design recently that I think I’m going to try instead, I wasn’t really happy with the way the wires in my current trellis just sort of wrapped around the center support anyways. This will be a project for spring though, the raspberry plants had so many issues this year that only two of them needed trellis support anyways and now their season is pretty much over.
The landscaping company made good on the surprisingly small amount of damage that removing that tree was responsible for by the way, look up J D’s Trees if you need something like this done in the northwest Ohio area. I was quite satisfied with their work and would go through them again if needed, thankfully that was the only huge tree in our yard. We do have a few evergreens in the back but they’re still in great health and not nearly as tall or large.