Goodbye lovely, stinky trees...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When i bought this house, I also bought an orchard.

Not a real orchard…just a bunch of fruit trees. in my ~1/4 acre back yard there were 4 pear trees and 7 apple trees. This house had been a rental for over 20 years, so except the time when a landscaper lived here, the trees had not been properly cared for.

During my first spring here, I had my friends come help me take down 3 apple trees, plus some limbs from 2 others. We got them down, chopped them up in to logs, chipped the branches and burned the rest.

During the summer, my dad and uncle noted that the weight of the fruit was bringing down the branches of the remaining trees. So they did a LOT of pruning. I spent most of the rest of the summer burning branches.

As the summer progressed, the fruit fell. A lot of fruit. Had I been so inclined to collect this fruit, I would say it was “bushels and bushels of fruit.”

Who knew that you could ignore fruit trees for 20 years and still have so much fruit?

Since some of the trees were over 30’ tall, and I was busy cleaning up the rest of the mess in both the front and back yards…not to mention busy being a new single homeowner…the fruit just ended up on the ground. The dog ate the pears. The bees ate the pears. The apples caused people to bend their ankles. The bees and the pears and the apples made mowing my lawn quite a trip.

I tried to live with it, I really did. But my yard started to stink of rotten pears. The bees bit the dog (yes - I had a dog with bees shooting out of it’s mouth!) The bees came inside (looking for more pears?) My mower got full of pears. I kept twisting my ankle.

My mom, who has somehow become quite anti-tree (she has had a lot of her own trees cut down) complained and complained about these trees (on my behalf?) I finally told her that if she’s paying, I’ll have them cut down.

“I’ll give you to the end of the summer to see how pissed I am at you trees!” I said.

Well, the trees just pushed me too far. My mom also pushed me quite far.

So, the trees have been sentenced to death.

Of course, since the weather here in Ohio has been wonky so far, I didn’t get a chance to have a tree company come out for an estimate until now.

The trees have indeed put on quite a show as their last defence. The apple trees have the most amazing pink and white flowers right now. The pear trees (albeit stinky) have little vibrant green leaves. All of the pruning that was done last year makes the yard look like a perfect little English cottage yard. It’s really quite beautiful.

But I can’t back down now. I have 4 tree companies lined up for estimates. I have to remember the bees and the mush and the stink and the ankles and the pits in my yard. I have to remember the mess and the brush and the burning. I must remember that every single one of those beautiful little flowers will soon become a nasty piece of fruit rotting on my lawn.

sigh

So, goodbye trees. You beautiful, stinky, nasty fruit-droppers. My yard will seem so empty without you…

I will have one tree left - a very strange, mangled cherry tree of some sort. In the middle of the yard. For some reason it has only bloomed in little patches here and there. I’m sure most of it is dead. But I have to have at least one tree.

(but when I have the money, I will be replacing them with something less…fruity)

2

Sad to see the backyard orchards go, but yeah – I know what you mean about the bushels of fruit thing: got a wild apple out back that’s survived two assassination attempts. Now I just let it do its thing. The birds love it, so … shrug

3

Take lots of pictures now while the trees are pretty. And you might as well take the cherry down too, if it’s half dead. Or it’ll end up coming down during the next good storm anyway.

4

What a shame! I’d kill to have a house with big, beautiful fruit trees. Why not just pick up the fruit as it drops, rather than letting it rot? Give it to neighbors, friends, and family. We used to have a little old man that lived nextdoor that filled his entire yard with tomato plants. Every so often, we’d hear the doorbell ring and there would be five or six grocery bags full of super delicious tomatoes. It was great!

5

I hate to say this, seeing how you got your four estimates and all, but if you’re so inclined to do, you could call the local church with a food bank (pantry) and tell them you have the fruit bearing trees for anyone of their volunteers who wants to come pick the fruit for the food bank. I’m not by any means suggesting that they send the clients of the food bank to your yard, however, chances are good that they have quite a few volunteers associated with the church who would be willing to come every other week and pick fruit to distribute.

Fresh vegetables and fruits are VERY difficult to obtain for food bank distribution to the hungry.

This way, you could still have blooming trees, the dog could still have his pears, and you could do a service to your community

6

I fully sympathize. When we moved to our current house in Seattle, there was a large apple tree in the back yard.

“Neat” we thought. Little did we know…

As you said, the apples are heavy and cause the branches to sag. Suddenly I was getting facefulls of apple tree when I mowed the lawn.

The squirrels loved the apples - but only while they were on the tree. They’d hang off the branch near one and nibble on it until it broke off and dropped to the ground. Then they’d move on to another apple. Our yard was filled with nibbled apples.

Sometimes the apples fell onto the roof with a startlingly loud “THUNK…rollrollrollroll” at odd hours of the day or night. One actually managed to lodge itself in the top of our gutter’s downspout. I had to climb up the ladder in a heavy rain to the roof to unplug the gutter.

And then of course the apples on the ground would start to rot, so you had to go around and pick them all up and throw them out before they got too stinky. I saw a rat nibbling on one once, which didn’t make me feel any more charitable towards the tree.

On top of it all, the tree was heavily cantilevered towards one side. At some point in its life it had been “V” shaped with two separate trunks. One had been cut off before we bought the house, so all the weight/mass of the tree was in one direction - towards our house. <Gulp!>

After three years of this, we’d had enough, and the tree went. Can’t say I’ve ever really missed it - the shrubs that were behind it have filled in nicely. My only problem is that the roots/stump continue to send out suckers and new shoots every year, and I have to go out every couple of months and cut them down. Hopefully it’ll get the idea that it’s supposed to die off eventually.

7

I have an apricot tree by my house. Where it’s located, it’s hard to get to to pick the apricots. And when it’s got apricots, it seems like about a one week window where you go from unripe apricots to a yard of rotting apricots. It blooms too early and gets frozen out abot 9 out of 10 years, but every few years, I am giving away bags of apricots.

8

Even though there is a lot of fruit…there is actually just a lot of SMALL and BUGGY fruit (remember, they’ve never been looked after). The apples wouldn’t be worth much to a food bank because you could only maybe make cobbler or applesauce out of them (something with lots and lots of sugar). I don’t have the time, energy or money to invest in making the fruit worth eating.

The pears are very delicious but they are also small (not so buggy, though). Problem with **Diosa’**s idea is that the pear trees are super tall - there’s no way to pick them before they fall. Once they fall, they are bruised, half-eaten or full of bees.

So, the apples are pick-able and not worth picking. The pears are not pick-able but not really worth saving.

I will have to take some pictures, yeah.