While working from home, I try to take a break each hour and take a short walk around the house to get the blood flowing again. It doesn't seem like much, but if I worked in the office, I would be going to get coffee/water or the restroom - which is more than 6-10 steps away from my chair.
Tuesday morning as I was in the backyard I heard a crack and saw some green leaves fall in the property behind me (where the parking lot for the apartments to the left is). Didn't think anything of it as small, dead branches have been falling on a regular basis with the drought this summer. My guess is that was the start to the end.
At lunch time, I went to take another gander around my gardens. But when I got out the back door I immediately noticed there was something amiss.
The neighbor's kid to the right happened to be just finishing mowing, so I told him about it because I know sometimes their dog goes back there (not often, but it happens. The next time I went out, I happened to catch the the landlord walking up to the apartments, which was amazing since he is rarely there. I pointed out the widowmaker so he could have it taken care of. By late afternoon, the top had weakened the small trees that were holding it, so that part was down even though the trunk was still in the air.
Friday morning around 9, there was a terrible racket and the house started shaking, then I heard chainsaws starting up. Can you see the guy cutting on the tree top in the first picture?
By noon, this was all that was left. BTW, the terrible racket that had the house shaking was the grinder they used to reduce it all to wood chips - actually wood chunks.
Don't know why the tree came down. It wasn't windy and the tree top looked pretty healthy. As I was picking up the chunks that had made it into my backyard, I noticed they were heavy with moisture, so it is pretty strange. On the other hand, it was a maple, of the junkier kind (not red, swamp or rock), and I believe those are just fairly week trees to begin with.
The last time my area got a decent rain was clear back at the end of June and since then we've gotten a reliable 1/4" of precipitation each week. This past week my area didn't even get any moisture besides dew so we are dry, dry, dry. I've been mowing every 2-3 weeks and this past Friday was one of those times. It only took less than 1 hour and 15 minutes to do both yards, which normally is about 2.3 hours or so. I didn't mow about 1/4 of the neighbor's yard, and about 1/3 of my yard didn't get touched. Those areas were either brown (most of my front yard and part of the side yard), or where even the weeds hadn't bothered to grow (back behind the pen and between the shade garden and sitting area, plus the neighbor's back yard).
NH counts 90+* days like Kansans count 100* days. Our average is 10 days per year, but we are officially up to 21 (or maybe 22 since I didn't see the news Friday night). I know it got up to 90 at my house Friday, but they only count days that Concord gets up there since that is the official spot. However, yesterday the high was int the low 70's so it seems to be turning the corner. Still basically no chances of rain, but cooler will at least help.
That maple tree surely presented a challenge for the crew that took it out. As you alluded to, it would present much more danger than a fully-standing or fully-downed one.
Some maples are so fast at growing that they forget to grow strong. Our silver maples were that way on Sunrise; but, since they were free (given to us as saplings by Doug & Lynn Stone who wanted to get rid of them) and gave us shade, quickly, I couldn't complain. Fortunately, a May ice storm took out the one in the front yard which I replaced with a pin oak.
The sugar maple that we just took out had borers.
Posted by: Cop Car | August 16, 2020 at 10:24 AM