On Wednesday, we headed out to Fort St. James for a full day of tree work. It was a beautiful day–sunny but not too hot with a nice breeze.
Job #1
We started out the day in a backyard with a lovely enclosing hedge and lawn. It was a large spreading birch tree with a few frost cracks, growing close to both the client’s and the next door neighbour’s house, as well as power and phone lines.
In a small space, it’s important to have full control of branches coming down from the tree. Allan and Tim were especially careful when lowering the larger tops of the multiple stems, which Jeremy and I stacked neatly along with the rest of the brush in the yard for the client to haul away.
Because of the interesting shape of the birch tree, it was a bit of a puzzle to get all the branches off with a minimum of climbing up and down stems. Allan and Tim had to be a bit creative–good thing they’re flexible!
To bring down the top of the house-side stem safely, Tim used a strategy called rigging, attaching a rope to the stem above the cut line and using a lower branch stub as a pivot to catch the top and allow Jeremy to lower it carefully to the ground.
Job #2
Next, we moved on down the block to remove a few spruce trees tied up in the phone lines. The trees had grown in around the lines and their growth was putting pressure on the cables. We removed all the trees in the group except for one central spruce with two codominant stems, from which Allan and Tim removed dead branches and pruned the boughs that grew close to the lines.
We chipped all the brush from the removals, creating a whole load of fragrant spruce chips. It was important to be very careful of the lines, so branches were dropped straight down beside the trunk or aimed over the line towards the chipper. For the tops, Tim, Allan, and Jeremy used a very neat technique called speed-lining–basically you send the top down a zipline!
Afterwards, we moved to the backyard to remove one tree from a row of spruce between the client’s yard and her neighbour’s. It was also encroaching on the house. Jeremy went up the tree and efficiently removed the branches moving up the tree; then, he removed the top and cut the stem off in blocks on his way back down.
Job #3
While we were at the first job, a neighbour down the street had requested that we remove one of their trees if we had time, so we headed back over to do just that. It was a three-stemmed spruce in the front yard that was inhibiting the growth of grass on the lawn and dropping many cones every year. It was a routine removal and within a couple hours of arriving it was like we were never there–except the tree was gone, of course!
Whispering Boughs Tree Service 