Goodbye, Magnolia Tree

When we bought our house there was a large Magnolia tree behind our garage.  I thought the area had potential, but there wasn't much we could do with it at the time.  I raked leaves for a while, but It was pointless as they never kept falling.  There was also a lot of running bamboo, and enough leaf litter that I was afraid to walk back there, not knowing what was underneath.

Eventually I decided to try to kill the bamboo by cutting it down and smothering it with old carpet.  While dealing with the bamboo, I had to wade through the leaves and I was surprised what I found.  It's not very interesting in hindsight, but,  it was the first time I had walked back there.  The area was a lot larger than I thought and there were a lot of nandina plants as well.  I tried to dig them up, but the ground was so full of roots, from the Magnolia and the bamboo, that I could never get a shovel in the ground.

Just after Thanksgiving, a few large limbs fell into our neighbor's yard.  They didn't hit anything, but it was an ominous sign - is this tree dying?  Will more limbs fall?  This ended up being a long, drawn out process.  We called the city to find out about permits etc. and they sent an arborist to look at the tree and the he gave his approval to take it down.  I got a permit for the work - the only thing left was to find a tree company.

Our neighbors recommended a company that did work for their church and had given them a good price.  We had no idea how much this would cost, but we wanted it to cost less than $1000.  Someone from that company came and gave us an estimate of $1550.  It was definitely more than we wanted to pay.  We tried to get recommendations from other neighbors, but no one had any - we had no other plan than to pick 5 names from the yellow pages and get estimates from them.  The next people we called quoted us $850 without grinding the stump, because his stump grinder was broken.  Another company gave us an estimate of $1850 - it was not looking good.  We started thinking we couldn't afford to have the tree removed, so we got quotes to trim it as well.  Most of these were between $600 and $800.  Finally we got a quote that sounded too good to be true - a guy came and quoted us $675 for everything.  Once we got a price we liked, Robin asked me if still wanted to cut it down or just trim it - I said, "for $675, I wanted it gone!"  She thought the price seemed too low and called to get more information from him, including references.  When she called them, they said they felt the same way about his price, but he did a good job.

He came with a couple of guys on Monday afternoon and, in about three hours, they had removed the whole tree, with the exception of several trunk pieces and the stump.  He came back Wednesday afternoon and loaded the large pieces onto his trailer and used the stump grinder to finish the job.

Now that the tree is gone, I need to get back there and clean up a few limbs, leaves and a little bamboo - and level out the wood chips left over from the stump grinding.  Once that is done, it's probably going to be the site for our new chicken coop.

Garden Injury

TO DO LIST:
Trim Trees
Work on the Pond
Plant Ferns
Work on Raised Bed
Cut Grass

These are some of the things on my list of things to do this weekend. I've been collecting concrete blocks for the raised bed vegetable garden. Originally I planned 4 x 8 raised beds using cinderblocks. The blocks would also give me additional planting holes. I started laying out the bed this week and 4 x 8 is too big if you factor in the extra eight inches of the blocks on each side and the ends. Unfortunately the bed will have to be smaller for me to be able to reach the center comfortably. On the plus side, I won't need as many concrete blocks.

Last week, maybe longer ago, I bought several hardy ferns from Lowe's on clearance. I've never seen them on sale before, so I felt I had to grab them. I've been meaning to plant them, but I just hasn't happened.

Recently I noticed a small but steady loss of water in the pond, more than I thought there would be with just evaporation. I noticed a constant wet spot on one of the timbers lining the bog. I figured out that it was probably water running over the liner not where it was supposed to go. I disconnected the pump to the bog until I could get around to redirecting the flow of water from the bog.

I had plans to trim the two massive trees in our yard. One is a large Magnolia behind the garage where, if I can trim it back enough, I'd like to put a chicken coop in the not-too-distant future. The other in the old Oak tree in front of our house. We're starting to get some low-hanging limbs and I wanted to cut those back. They were beginning to get in the way of power lines, cars and us.

Friday afternoon, I decided that the Magnolia could wait and I wanted to start on the Oak. I got the ladder out and a few tools - handsaw, tree saw and loppers. There was a lot of dead stuff in the tree, so I began by pulling most of that stuff out - I tried the loppers on a few branches, but they were two big, so I got out the tree saw. I would hold the branch still with my right hand and saw with my left. I successfully cut a couple of the branches before the accident happened. The part of the branch I was holding was lower than the part that I was cutting. When it slipped out of the groove I was cutting, gravity and the force of pulling on the saw directed it down the branch where my hand was - dragging the saw across the back of my hand. It didn't bleed much, but it looked pretty gross. I cleaned it, put some antibiotic ointment on it and a couple of band aids and we left to go to the doctor.

WARNING - GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS

Once there, Dr. Morgan saw me fairly quickly. I'm not sure if they realized how bad it was then, but after they got a look, they were disappointed that their students had left for the day. My injury was actually two deep cuts very close together with a thin strip of skin between them. He said I would definitely need stitches and that I was lucky that it wasn't any deeper or I would have nicked an artery. Dr. Morgan proceeded to numb the area and once that was accomplished, he pulled out the needle and thread and started sewing me up. To this point I wasn't queazy at all, but when it was time to do the stitches, I decided not to watch. I got over that quickly and tried to see what was going on, but his hands were in the way for the most part. It was fascinating that, with just six stitches, everything was pulled back together. My biggest disappointment about this whole thing - besides feeling like an idiot for getting hurt - is not getting to be in the yard doing the stuff on the list.