Almost four years ago, we fell in love with a little house nestled up into a hill with trees all around. I think it reminded us a little more of our native Michigan than most other real estate we had inspected, and Aaron likes yard work more than inside work, so we bought it. We haven’t regretted this decision, but oh boy! These trees have taken a little more tending than we expected.

A Tale of Two Trees

Last summer our city decided to take down a tree in our neighbors’ yard, which we thought was great, since it hung over our house and made us nervous during windy storms. And taking it out would mean our newly seeded grass in the back yard could get more sunlight.  Well. Surprise! Even though the tree is in the other yard, the removal crew felt it was acceptable to climb up  our hill of newly sprouted grass on their way to taking down the tree and leaving the branches on the other place in the yard that has new growth.

It’s kind of hard for the newly sprouted grass to grow after being trampled or covered with branches. All the fresh grass was afflicted in some way.  This brought Aaron much grief, so he made some calls and the city sent someone over to reseed the area after we got our yard cleared out from the branches from our neighbor’s tree that was cut down by the city.  (We were responsible for moving the branches even though it wasn’t our tree.)

The person who came to put down new seed in our yard accidentally roto-tilled a bunch of wires by our shed, which took down land lines and internet all over the neighborhood. Then the person who came to fix our internet somehow didn’t get our connection reset so we were offline for two days.

The worst part? They only took the parts of the tree that were in the way of the wires. This is what we see in the backyard now. 
Luckily, our latest tree adventure wasn’t quite so challenging. After some procrastinating, we decided to fell the huge tree in front of our front door, the one that took two people’s arms to span the circumference, that was touching the house and making horrid creaking sounds against the roof every time the wind blew. It pains me to say this, because I think I have DIY in my DNA, but  it was so huge and foreboding, being over the house and right by the door, that we saved up and paid someone else to do this. We drove away from Iowa last week to spend Thanksgiving with family and left our forestry project for the real professionals.

When we came home, we just had a stump and some sawdust.
I finished teaching some piano lessons Monday evening and came out to find Aaron laboriously assaulting the stump with this axe, so I asked, “Are you making this into a planter or did you have a bad day at the lab?” (It will be a planter, we hope. But Aaron will have to be in charge of the plants since I always kill them.)