Oh Happy Day!

City foresters came on Wednesday to cut down three ramshackle, dying boxelder trees (Acer negundo) on city park property near the south side of my house. In order to be able to get at the trees, they had to remove a bit of over- and undergrowth in the area. And that growth, my friends, was none other than my sworn garden enemy, buckthorn. Yippee!!

Now, you know how much I hate buckthorn. I know you do. You read about my removal efforts here. You cheered about my clearing progress here. You patiently listened to my Scorn of Buckthorn song here.

So I don't have to tell you how gratifying it was to see some of it coming down, but I'll say it anyway. It was marvelous! An area equivalent to what took me weeks and weeks, over years, to clear was gone in about an hour.

If I would have been sure I could have gotten right back up, I would have dropped to my knees, that's how thankful I was. And if I hadn't been so happy, I probably would have cried.

The first boxelder (first photo) was fairly straightforward to fell. The second (above) had multiple trunks.

Timber! The third boxelder goes down. (The white pine branches are left over from holiday decorations and I'm saving them for pine straw.)

They had a winch rope that helped pull the felled trees to the shredder. A lot easier than pulling them yourself, I can assure you.

I wish I had a shredder like this. I had to cut up dozens of 15-ft trees to get them to fit into twenties of yard waste bags. Die buckthorn die! Buhahaha!

Here's what the cleared area looks like. I've still got a lot to pull out and clean up, but it's huge progress. The pink line is where my previously cleared section starts.

Positive side effects are that my veggie bed will now get more sun, and I can expand the bed as well because more sun reaches what used to be a shadier corner of the bed. Plus, much of my front garden will get more sun too and that's a plus because most of my plants need more sun than they've been getting. And, in the cleared area, all of a sudden I have room to plant certain things I had no idea where they were going to go, like an awesome hummingbird seed mix from Botanical Interests. (Um, it doesn't grow hummingbirds but plants hummers like.)

That's a win-win-win. Hooray!