I wasn’t the only one working from home the other day – we had an arborists team here, too, to take care of our trees.

Before we ever even closed on the house but after the previous owners had moved out we drove by one day to see this:

They took care of that branch but our poor neighbor was rather scared of having the rest of the tree fall into her house. The way it was leaning was just a tad bit too much of a liability…

We’ve also had the nastiest problem with a sticky film of a sap-like goo all over our cars. Logic solution number 1: park cars in garage – uhm we don’t have a garage. Logic solution number 2: Find out what’s causing the sap. And so we did.
There’ve been huge swarms of snowflakes, wait no, it’s summer, white fuzzy bugs rather, living in our Hackberry trees. The poor trees shed their leaves and everything from cars to patio furniture and grill cover got covered with a nasty, milky, sticky film.. Thanks to gardening books from the library and Google we identified them as Wooly Hackberry Aphids.

So we bought Wooly Hackberry Aphid poison and gave it to the trees to drink. Didn’t do a heck of a lot unfortunately but it sounds like this should have been taking care of in spring anyway. But slowly the trees had gotten rid of most of their leaves so that helped with our cars at least…

Nonetheless, the arborists recommended taking one of them down as well. And BOOM did it come down! The crew did a really impressive job, climbing up and taking out branches until it was save to cut the trunk. They also cleaned up a lot of our other trees and took out a dead dogwood tree.

Thanks to all the clearing we now have a ton more light in our front and back yards. Raised beds full of tomatoes here we come! Well, next year. For now I’ll just focus on planting skeletons and headstones!