More damn trees...

When I got back from Germany, we had a storm which dumped almost six inches of rain in two days, with wind. None of my trees came down, although a neighbor's did.

But, last Wednesday, when it was windy, I noticed that one of my trees (100 ft Douglas Fir) had a lean. I checked the base (it's surrounded by bushes), and sure enough, the ground was heaving with each gust of wind. That's bad - it means the roots have broken, and the tree will eventually fall, probably on my neighbor's house. They're trying to sell it, and it'd be considerably more difficult to do so with a tree cutting through the living room.

Since one of my other trees had done just that last year, I felt that some preventative action was required. I called my tree guys (Wind Thin), and they came out and looked at it.

This one's going to be expensive - about $2600 - because it's right next to the fence, and there's no nearby trees to tie it off to... they tried to get a crane out, but my driveway's too steep for the size they need. A bigger crane could work, but the estimate for that was $10-12,000. Fortunately, my back neighbor's pretty reasonable, so we may have to take a section of the fence down and drop the sections of the tree in his back yard.

I really like having all these trees, I'm hoping this is the last major expense for a few years.