Elm Be Gone!

Greetings to all!  It's me, Mags!  We've been meaning to tell you about some excitement here at Ao4 Headquarters from a couple weeks ago.  Some of you might remember back in November, we had some guys come take a couple of our pine trees away?  Well, they came back!

"Umm... Mom?  You might want to see this."

I knew that door would come in handy!  How else would Mom and Dad have known the guys were driving through her garden and onto the lawn?  And, no.  It's not like I barked or anything; we don't do that.  I did stare, though.

Apparently, Mom and Dad knew they were coming.  The tree in question this time?  Our King's Choice Elm:

King's Choice - but not mine - Elm

The neighbors' Weeping Willow was planted after our Elm, but it was choking it out, and both trees are just a mess. Or the Elm was. Anyway, it needed to go.  Long story.

They couldn't get the truck down to the back yard, so they parked the truck in the front yard and extended their crane even further than when they did the pine - over the house and into the yard!

The truck/crane

They were real careful and didn't kill any of Mom's plants or the grass or crunch a lawn sprinkler head or anything!  Now let's get going on that tree!

Just like before, this one guy Travis was lifted into the tree, so he could hook up a sling to lift the branches out as he cut them.

Travis was in this tree somewhere, hooking up the crane

We were out on the back deck, so we could supervise.  We heard some buzzing, then ...

"Whoa!"

I mean - check it out!

Tree chunk #1 has lift-off!

Mom had two requests of the crew - please don't get hurt and please don't drop a tree on our house!

"Hey, Cam!  Is this cool or what?!?!"
"Awesome!"

Here's Travis, going in for the next chunk:

Ready to tackle the next chunk!

We thought he might need our help for this part.

"Safety first, Travis!"
"Yes.  Do be safe, Travis!"

Waiting for them to haul out the section he just cut

And there it goes!  Up and over the house!

This part always made Mom nervous!

Still lots of tree to go!

"I'm not sure how he'd be able to do this without my supervision!"

They lifted the next section up and out.  Mom ran around to the front of the house to shoot that part:

They had their chipper machine in the street, so it went right in and was turned into mulch!

Just one more section and the trunk to go!

All hooked up!

Giving the thumbs up to go ahead and haul it out!

Cam and I managed to supervise and stay busy while the crew worked:

Me and Cam

We have lots of videos of the whole process, too.  We'll try to put those together for you, too.  It was pretty cool.

Here's what the area looked like at the end of the day:

No more Elm!

Mom's plan for that area is to dig out those big bushes (already done, by Dad!), remove the river rock to other parts of the garden, then to plant a wildflower garden! Mom and Dad are already hard at work on it; we'll keep you posted on their progress.  We've been supervising, of course!

Do your bipeds come up with crazy changes for your garden?  Are you as helpful as we are?

Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher