In November, I posted about the ash tree in our backyard being massively damaged by emerald ash borers, with an assist from woodpeckers.
This week, with the ground frozen and the tree service available, it was cut down. The last time we had a tree removed from the backyard, the tree service parked a truck with a boom in our driveway and worked over the garage roof. They have gotten some new, more flexible equipment since then. Our favorite was this platform vehicle.
It operated by remote control! Biggest remote control vehicle I’d ever seen…
When it was in the backyard and in use, it looked like this:
The first thing that happened was trimming of some encroaching limbs from two nearby maple trees. Next, the branches of the ash were sawed off and lowered to the ground to be picked up and fed into a chipper that was parked along the street. Then, the upper parts of the trunk were cut until what was left could be brought down without hitting the house.
They used a chainsaw to cut a huge wedge near the base of the trunk.
And, finally, this:
Because other trees are so close, they didn’t try to grind down the stump for fear of damaging the roots of the maples and oak. I wonder how long it will be to adjust to the new look of the backyard?
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So sad to see another ash tree lost due to the emerald ash borer. We lost four in our backyard and I still miss them.
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I’m sorry to hear you lost so many trees. We don’t have many ash in our neighborhood, so I had hoped the borers would miss us, but no such luck. We may lose one of our maples to verticillium wilt this year, too. We have to wait and evaluate it in the spring.
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There are even bigger remote control vehicles chopping down trees in the forests. However, the biggest I have ever seen are remote controlled diesel locomotives. Stop by any big city railroad yard and it’s highly likely you’ll see remove-controlled locomotives. They are everywhere now.
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Thanks for the info! I don’t live anywhere near a big city, so I’m not familiar with the locomotives.
I don’t think I want to run into the forest-chopping size! The machine in our backyard didn’t do any chopping; it was just a platform. We were glad that it was small enough to easily fit through our side yard without going over to our neighbors’ house.
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I’m sorry you lost the tree. My sister lost several big trees in a hurricane and she did, in fact, have to get used to the new nature of her backyard and actually replant some items. I hope it goes well. And how interesting that they couldn’t grind the stump!
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Thanks, Ellen. I hadn’t appreciated quite how large the ash tree was until we were left with just the stump. It was cut fairly close to the ground, but, even if we are here another twenty years, it probably won’t decay totally. Once we see if the maple tree needs to come down, we can look into planting something new or not. We are going to need to do major re-landscaping for our front and side yards because of the geothermal system installation.
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