Today was Memorial Day. Both my mom and our friends are visiting from out of town. We planned to sit around today, play games, and not much else. This afternoon my friend’s oldest son said he was bored, so he asked if he could mow my yard. Absolutely! While he was mowing, his dad was walking around and noticed that the tree in our front yard had some dead branches. After cutting off a few branches, he looked closer and told me that my tree was dying. Evidently it is infected by the “emerald ash borer.”
The tree is to the left in this picture.
Since we are selling our house, we had two options: do nothing and hope nobody notices until after the house sold, or cut the tree down.
We thought the second option was more ethical. Our African-American neighbor (white guy from South Africa) saw us using a tree hand saw to cut down this tree (about 8 inches in diameter) and loaned us his chainsaw. It went much faster after that. In no time at all we had the trunk and large branches cut up and stacked, and the smaller branches gathered in our side yard for disposal (no idea how to get rid of them, but I’ll find that out tomorrow I guess).
My best friend expertly wielding the chainsaw.
So now we have no tree. I looked into methods for stump removal, and since we have no truck, no chain, and no dynamite (the HOA might frown on that last one anyway), I put some bricks around the stump (which is at ground level) and filled the space with dirt. Tomorrow I will get some flowers and it will look great. Hopefully nobody looking at our house asks, “Hey, what happened to the tree?”
Before flowers.
Words of Truth 
My mom and dad’s tree was dying, too, from the same thing. They paid to have it treated every year, and it was pretty pricey. They sold the house 3 years ago, and the tree will eventually come down. It doesn’t seem the new peeps are paying to have it treated. Of course, they could be like the neighbors and just leave a dead tree in their front yard forever.
Good idea about planting flowers around the stump 🙂 It already looks nice. It will look nicer with flowers.
Thankfully we found a friend who is dealing with lots of tree cuttings and he said we could just dump the branches at his house. We’re trying to sell our house so treating it wasn’t an option. So now the tree is totally gone (we took it over there this morning). We planted marigolds over the stump and everything looks good outside now.
Wow! That’s pretty wonderful that you were able to dump the branches at your friend’s house. Those could be a huge headache to get rid of.
Glad all worked out for you! 🙂