Another Tree Bites the Dust

Perfect placement of the downed mulberry
earned my hubby fishing time on Sunday

Hi all! I am pretty upbeat today which is a nice change from Friday when everything went wrong. Not only was I informed our gutters are rotted and so is our cupola, I managed to lose my car/house keys in our woods. My spouse and I searched in the dark with flashlights but couldn't find them.

Luckily it didn't rain like it was supposed to and after I unsuccessfully searched again the next morning, I offered a $5 reward to whichever of my children found them. 10 minutes later, I had my keys back.

Turns out while I was hauling brush, the key chain, which was in my jacket pocket at the time, managed to get snagged by one of the branches (probably when I tripped on a virginia creeper vine and the wheelbarrow with the brush tipped over on top of me).

Why was I hauling brush in the dark? Well, because my peach and cherry trees had arrived and so it was time to take down the big mulberry by our driveway. And because we didn't know what the weather was supposed to be like, we figured we'd better hit the ground running Saturday morning which meant taking down smaller branches the prior evening.

I always get queasy to my stomach when we take down trees, especially the bigger ones. I didn't feel bad about this one though. It was a three-strikes-you're-out scenario. In 2009 it had been struck by lightning and we had to remove one of its main forks, leaving it misshapen and ugly. It also had leaf spot disease and some other issue that left dark smears on its trunk and branches. Thirdly, it was one of the invasive morus alba, not our native morus rubra.

We should have hired an arborist to take it down 'cuz it was quite large and if we didn't drop it right, it'd crush either our neighbor's car and newly-planted shrubs, or our spruces. Luckily, after one large dropped branch took my husband off the ladder (he says he jumped) he gained some respect for the tree, slowed down, and with our neighbor's help, managed to drop the rest of the tree into perfect position, saving car, shrubs and spruces, not to mention all of us would-be lumberjacks.

What a mess!

Dropping the tree, cutting it into manageable bits and then carting away the branches took us all day. However, I still had some time to get my Reliance peach tree and North Star cherry tree (both from Stark Bros) planted, all the garlic mustard and dandelions pulled from my future berry garden, and two virginia creeper vines trimmed in the same section of yard.

The only sad part of the whole deal was that I also ended up taking out two small trees that turned out to be Nannyberry. The small one was badly infected with cottony maple leaf scale. The bigger one was just too big to transplant and had to be removed because it was too near the house.

Nannyberry buds

Our arborist had told me they were viburnums and I didn't know there are native viburnums, so when another arborist told me they were scrub trees, I didn't research them as carefully as I should have. Of course, after I had removed them, I found a photo of a Nannyberry (viburnum lentago) on the 'net. (The buds are very distinctive and look a bit like a lily-flowering tulip before it opens).

According to the 'net, nannyberries have edible fruit and are decent wildlife shrubs/small trees. Dang it! Luckily I still have others on the other side of the property so I'll take good care of those and now I'll know how to identify their saplings.