Gardening: Hiring an arborist pays off with healthy trees
A long time ago, I felt sorry for a little tree seedling that appeared in my vegetable garden. I dug it up and replanted it nearby. Little did I know it was a Siberian elm and now I wish I’d just thrown it in the compost.
The tree grew into a 30-foot monster that hung over the driveway. Heavy snows over the years brought down some branches but two big ones just hung in there, storm after storm. The branches were too high and too big for my pole saw and I could see that my trying to take them down would only end in disaster for me.
In the end, all it took to bring one branch down was that windy Wednesday we had a couple of weeks ago. But the wind didn’t do a complete job and left a branch hanging over the driveway just waiting for an unsuspecting delivery truck to drive under it. It hung there daring me to do something about it.
And so, I did. I called a local tree service company, and within a day, an arborist rolled in and safely made it under the branch. I was a little skeptical because the guy only had a big trailer full of branches in tow. How was he going to climb up to the branches? Curtis simply put on his climbing harness and up he went, saw in hand. The hazardous branch was down in no time.
He then took out two other potentially hazardous branches that needed to come down. As he cut, he confirmed I had no business even thinking about taking them down myself. With the branches on the ground, he began cutting up the branches and loading them in the trailer. The trailer load grew higher and higher until he climbed up on it and sliced up the branches to pack them down into the bed. He did this several times – there were lots of branches. I couldn’t just stand there so I pitched in loading what I could safely reach.
Since we still burn wood in a fireplace, he cut the large branches and trunks into fireplace lengths and we piled them up to dry for a few months. For those of you who think burning wood isn’t climate friendly, may I remind you that we live at the very end of our Avista line and a wood fireplace has saved us on several occasions when a storm took the power out for a week.
Hiring a good arborist is always the best idea when you have tree issues. They have the knowledge about tree health, felling mechanics, the proper equipment and, best of all, insurance to do the job safely and to leave the tree in as healthy condition as possible. They may seem to be expensive, but you are paying for their knowledge backed up with a few carefully chosen saw cuts.