We've had a short-lived spring heat wave or two here in Phoenix, but otherwise it has been a pretty mild spring... even a bit chilly, it doesn't seem like it should be in the mid 40s in the mornings here this time of year... or maybe I am just getting wimpy after 16+ years in the Valley.
This week, we finally dealt with a remnant of the winter. You may recall we had a few very unusual sub-freezing mornings here in January... that bit of cold snap had some serious repercussions our plants and trees. Seemingly overnight the whole neighborhood turned from green to brown... with frost killing a good deal of the foliage.
This is what our backyard tree looked like earlier this week.
Todd feared the tree was dead. I just couldn't possibly imagine a tree of that size would be killed by just a couple of cold days. Alas the answer was somewhere in between.
Our tree was just one of dozens (and dozens!) of trees that looked like this around the 'hood -- one house has about 6 of these same trees, yikes! -- so we took a "watch and wait" approach... see what everyone else was doing about it. For quite a long time, it was nothing. But just like the house painting frenzy a couple years ago, it only takes one or two houses to get the ball rolling... a couple of weeks ago, a seemingly daily parade of landscaping and tree companies were clogging our streets.
Good news ... our tree was not dead.
Bad news ... it had to be cut back, waaaay back.
Here's what it looked like yesterday afternoon.
As you can see there is some new growth on it (so we knew it wasn't "dead" dead)... but I have a feeling it is going to take some time to get back to its former glory (I know a picture probably exists of what it used to look like, but I'm too lazy to find it).
It only took the tree company only about 45 minutes to cut down and clear the tree... as well as some work and fertilization on our palm trees. A pleasant surprise was that it cost us less than $500... we feared it was going to be at least a $1k (a tree "trim" in the past, with another company, had been hundreds). But thanks to the volume of tree work that needs to be done around town, perhaps this company priced things reasonably to get more business... either that or cheap illegal immigrant workers!
The next step is to try to get grass to grow around the tree... since we moved into this house (over 5 years ago), some areas of the yard haven't seen any sun... as you can see, that has definitely changed.
Yes, yes, great tree, but WHY NO POST ABOUT SANJAYA?!
Posted by: TV Goddess | Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 11:11 AM
Our little tree started to come back and then died. There goes three years of growth!
Posted by: Scott-O-Rama | Monday, April 23, 2007 at 12:29 PM