Another Two Trees Come Down

This post is necessary just as a scene-setter for the next one, since it's about stuff we did last year when I wasn't blogging. Sometime last spring or early summer after all the leaves came in, we realized that two of our trees that were fine the year before were definitely not fine anymore. The mimosa (the arrow on the right) didn't grow any leaves at all, and the oak (on the left) either leafed out and then died or maybe just never dropped its leaves from the previous year. This corner of our yard, always damp (more on that in future posts), appears to be a major tree killer. A small one fell about two years ago and 9 years ago, several of the trees there died off.

D climbed up into the mimosa to see if it was still alive, despite having no leaves. We wondered whether we should give it another year. Nope, brittle and dried up. We probably could have cut down the mimosa ourselves (or ignored it for a while) but the other tree was too big to ignore. It couldn't hit the house but could potentially fall on the shed, so it had to come down.

And so in the pandemic year without too much to entertain us, we have a fun afternoon show watching the tree come down. We have a perfect view from inside our sun room, looking out the back patio doors. They cleared the lower branches first and then started taking the main trunk down, chunk by chunk. We even got some action shots:

And nothing fell on the shed, yay! They removed the mimosa for us too, while they were there, but it was much less dramatic and pretty much all from the ground.

So that was last summer. Then affter a very wet fall and watching this corner stay muddy for months, we realized we needed a better solution. It was too wet there even to sustain grass (or weeds). Time for something else.