{"id":2230,"date":"2007-03-13T21:56:24","date_gmt":"2007-03-14T02:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.1.5\/gardens\/gardenlog\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2017-07-19T12:42:33","modified_gmt":"2017-07-19T17:42:33","slug":"bring-in-the-professionals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/garden-essays\/bring-in-the-professionals\/","title":{"rendered":"Bring in the Professionals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not very much ever seems to get done around here. I do almost everything myself and I’m not a very focused worker. However, there are times when I call in the pros, one of those being when I need to have trees trimmed.<\/p>\n

I have ten trees over 30 feet tall in my yard. Most of them are 50 year old cedar elms which like to drop limbs on my roof or crush fences. I also have a difficult pecan tree which grows into the electric wires. The city came out about six years ago and hacked it back but in such a way as to make the problem worse–cutting it to encourage thin waterspouts to grow into the wires.<\/p>\n

So I called Tree Masters<\/a> because I was pleased with work they did for me before. Miraculously, the hour and a half that they were here this morning was the sunny period in this couple of days of torrential rain we’ve received. They dealt with the pecan tree in the electric wires and one large limb from a cedar elm with ease. I was making the bed when I saw the limb come down. They roped it first and it seemed to float down to the guys below who maneuvered it away from my flower beds without dropping it.<\/p>\n

In the short term, Tree Masters is not as cheap as hiring two guys with a chainsaw off the corner but in the long term it is a much better deal. They are insured. They don’t free climb or balance on long ladders. Their people are experienced, efficient, and neat.<\/p>\n

I wanted to keep the mulch but the arborist who’d come out to spec the job last week said that if they already had chips from a previous job that they’d have to dump them first because they wouldn’t want to infect my trees with oak wilt from another job. (One thing I like about professionals is the attitude that the customer is not always right; sometimes the customer needs to be educated so that she understands the ramifications of her choices.) As it turned out, the previous job was pecan, so I got to keep my wood chips plus what they had in the truck.<\/p>\n

They warned me that there were some huge tree stumps in the back of the truck, but…greedy, greedy me! I just can’t turn down free mulch<\/a>. I now have a pile of wood chips the size of a Hummer sitting in my driveway. What with the rain and all, I’m as happy as I can be.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should have a mulch moving party. Everybody bring a wheelbarrow.<\/p>\n

\"Zanthan
2007-03-14. The sight that greeted us as we walked out the door this morning. AJM dubbed it “Mulch Mountain”. Gee. Those stumps do look big.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Zanthan
2007-03-14. Pile of wood chips. I see an aching back in my future.<\/i>
\"Zanthan
2007-04-23. Finished! Now for the pile of wood.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5444,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions\/5444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}