Apologies for the lack of posts, I’ve been having health issues, which have slowed me down. Still not fully recovered, but hoping I’m heading in the right direction.
All that said, we have done some work on the house, and I’ll lump these smaller tasks into the next few posts.
Some of you may know that we have a large silver maple growing on our pavement/sidewalk. Our neighbor wanted it removed due to safety issues and although we partially agreed with them, we’d rather the tree remained, possibly with a good pruning as it gave us shade and privacy.
In the end, the tree was sadly removed, and what a difference its made to the street. All of a sudden, the street looks very open and plain, and we have lost privacy and shade.
To help compensate for this, we’ve been planting replacement sidewalk trees, yes, they will take years to mature, hence the haste. We planted three trees, a dogwood, a redbud, and a hawthorn (in that order), which are all native NY trees. The hawthorn is a spiky bugger and was donated to us at short notice. The root system had been severely cut back, but we dug a large hole and filled it with high-quality potting soil. That was probably a month ago, and since then, all the leaves have turned brown, which is to be expected; the tree is in shock, and we’ve been experiencing a bad heat wave. We have watered the tree on every non-rain day, so although the tree looks dead, I have confidence that it will spring back next year. It’s a pretty righteous with huge 2″ spikes, so I do hope it recovers. We also planted a second dogwood at the bottom of the garden, which is the last photo.
All that said about us being against trees removal, we did get the arborists, Limber Tree Services, to remove our walnut tree as neither of us liked it. At the same time, the arborist trimmed our Box Elder and removed one of our diseased Hemlock trees. I have to say that Limber Tree Services did an excellent job and didn’t trash any of our plants, so thank you very much.
Here are before and after shots.
The replacement for the Walnut tree is a Bur oak which should grow into a mighty tree and be around for a few hundred years. It’s probably 5 years old already and could grow up to 1 1/2 feet a year, so hopefully in another 10 years it will start to give us a bit of shade. A big thank you to Catskill Native Nursery who delivered the tree and even carried it to where we wanted to plant it. I highly recommend this nursery.
Elsewhere we’re trying to finish off the parging, testing out some of our concrete floor tiles and we’re collecting bathroom fittings so the plumber will know where to put all the pipe-work. I’ll cover these in the next post.