Obviously when I dreamt about cutting down the tree on the side of our house on Friday night, that meant that Saturday morning I had to get up, go to the hardware store, get a saw, come home and start sawing. Obviously.

I’ve had beef with this crooked tree for awhile. Can you blame me? First of all, it’s a quarter dead and super ugly. Second it’s growing into the electric lines and the house, thirdly it’s totally crooked. All bad things for a tree to be. So on Saturday the 5th of May, this tree came down.

Reason’s this baby didn’t come down sooner? I actually feel bad about cutting down a 25 year old tree, even though it’s crooked and ugly, and ugly not in a charlie-brown-tree sort of way, but a really-truly ugly sort of way. It’s not my fault though, it’s the fault of the person who planted a potentially 40 foot tall evergreen between two houses on a small city lot.

We started with the branches, I cut ’em as high as I could reach, and then Jeff did as far as he could reach. Then we got out our kitchen step stool, cause we don’t own a ladder, what? Yeah, we’re tough like that.

Finn is totally into this whole process. He’s the guy that throws the branches in a pile.

Now it’s time to get out the big guns. Jeff and I figure that there is no way this tree could actually weigh more than 30lbs, ha. We are dumb. So we decide to just cut it and then gently lower it into the yard, double ha. So I saw away while he makes sure it doesn’t lean to far into the wires above. Before we know the thing is coming down and it does not weigh 30lbs, it weighs like 200lbs and it is going wherever it wants to go, which is over the fence and onto our newly planted vegetable garden. AHHH. We are dumb, or I am, cause I had the dream. Anyway, we were lucky that this tree did not fall on our house, or on our neighbors house, or the power lines.
Fer real.

Now the fun begins. You know I love an excuse to take a trip to the nursery. We didn’t really know what we wanted to get to replace the spruce tree but we knew that it needed to be small in size and width and we preferred something flowering.

We narrowed it down to 3 choices, a weeping Ruby Tears crabapple, a Peegee Hydrangea and a Japanese Maple. We ended up choosing the crabapple, because the size was good, it grows to 10 feet tall and 10 feet wide. Our neighbors bedroom window is on the other side of the of the fence so it would be ideal to find something that offered him, and us, privacy. Plus I totally love thought of a small flowering tree in the corner of our garden.

For sentimental reasons I wanted a crabapple because when we moved in we got the crabapple in the front yard for Finn, and I thought it would be sweet to have another in honor of Gus. So there you have it, total cheese fest.

This Ruby Tear crabapple is a new breed of crabapple. It’s a weeping tree and can be pruned to whatever shape we like. When it’s mature it will resemble the shape of an umbrella. I think it will look really cool.

I’m really excited about the new set up, it’s weird not having that tree take up that space, but I think the new tree, will fit the bill and look pretty awesome too, once it gets more grown up, AND I’m glad we didn’t die taking down that other tree. Whoops.