Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. See, a 15,000-pound elm limb fell on our porch/yard/street/neighbors’ cars/power and phone lines, and we were without power for a while, and without phone/dsl for a while longer.
Yes, I said 15,000 lbs. That’s what the crane operator who hoisted it off the neighbor’s cars said, anyway.
This was the view from our porch at 11pm Saturday night:
We couldn’t get out of the house because the steps and yard were full of tree and there were live power lines everywhere. Fun. Made a hell of a noise coming down, but the kid slept through it all.
In the morning, it looked like this:
That’s not our car. Luckily, we’d pulled ahead and our neighbor parked in front of our house. Sucks for them, since both of their cars got hit (The one you can’t see for all the branches got totaled.) Lucky for us, since we can’t afford to replace our car, and it’s so old insurance wouldn’t have given us much for it.
Apparently this isn’t uncommon in summer, especially after the extreme heat we had last week, since our heat is so dry. One of the city forestry guys told us he never, ever parks under an elm tree in the summer. Good to know.
Luckily it happened at night. Our neighborhood is full of kids who play out there for hours every day. Everyone is fine. Everyone’s houses are fine. Everyone now has power and phones back. There were no dead animals found, so the raccoons and peregrines who nest in that tree are fine, too, though they haven’t been spotted since the incident. We’re totally, totally lucky. Even the neighbor with two trashed cars thinks so.
And you know what? Standing on your porch behind a wall of leaves and branches, in pitch dark because all the power is down, live wires hanging all around you? Once you know that you and your family and your neighbors are safe? It was kind of fun. In the morning, once the electric company had cleared our steps, a neighbor from a couple blocks up who still had power brought us buttered toast and bowls full of golden plums from her tree. We had a picnic on the steps and watched the crew chainsaw that huge limb apart. The kiddo has gotten to watch more chainsaws and trucks and guys in cherry pickers in the past few days than he had before in his whole life. Pretty cool.
Just don’t tell my neighbors I said so. I mean…the cars and all.
Oh, and our Japanese maple didn’t make it. Not such a loss, though. It just means I get to replace it with a fruit tree. What do you think? Plum? Cherry? I already have an Italian plum, a Comice pear, and a Negronne fig. (All of which got buried by the limbs and branches of the elm, then sprang right back up when uncovered. Young trees are RESILIENT.) I think the available spot wants a not-too-big tree. So I guess a cherry would have to be a dwarf. Are there dwarf cherry varieties that bear decent amounts of fruit? Suggestions welcome.
There are pear and plum trees that have four or five varieties spliced on. My Brown Turkey figs are very nice. You could also think about quince, it has lovely blossoms.
In the fall, Friends of Trees gives away free fruit trees. You could keep checking their website and also hit the Portland Nursery annual garage sale see what you go home with.
Eeep! So glad all of you in the neighbourhood are OK…
We have a dwarf sour cherry that produces quite a bit.
When the outcome is ok, nature’s destructiveness is pretty awesome. We’ll see if I still feel that way if my huge maple beside my driveway drops a 15,000 pound limb on my car. Glad it was just an adventure for you!
There are dwarf sour cherry varieties, North Star is one we have back East, that produce like crazy. And (at least out here) sour cherries are hard to find at any markets….
Sorry about the tree down, we had a limb fall on our power lines last December during a huge ice storm. We were without power for almost a week. It was cold, so not as much fun.
Wow! I’m so glad everyone is ok.
Gah!! We once had an ancient cherry tree topple over in a wind storm. It totaled an equally ancient fence missed destroying the side of our neighbors house by “that” much. I spent the next day keeping the hordes of neighbor children off of it while a friend cut it up for firewood. To this day I’m not sure where all those children came from.
Glad to know you’re all OK! I vote for sour cherry. We had two sour cherry trees growing up, and had the best pies and preverves in the world.
I vote for persimmon (food of the gods…this is utopia after all): http://www.portlandnursery.com/plants/treePicks/trees_persimmon.shtml
I’ve seen a few trees around town and they seem to product like crazy and are very pretty. So glad to hear you are all safe.
Oh my gosh! Glad everyone is ok, and I’d love to see the tree that a 15,000 pound LIMB belongs to.
Apricot!
I agree with the persimmon (Fuyu — sweet and can be eaten like an apple) or what about a crabapple…crabapple jelly is so pretty. There are dwarf cherries also a lemon tree is great..put christmas light (the old fashion kind) on it in the winter to keep it warm…
Very glad to hear that you are all safe.
I heard when it happened but seeing the pictures is just awesome! We are both looking at them now…so glad everyone is okay and that you can now have an exciting story to relive with the young one!
Wow! Cherry pickers and chain saws. This made me remember the days when the kids and I would sit in lawn chairs in our driveway and watch for the garbage truck every Tuesday. We lived on a street that was a large circle and so it went around twice (once on the inside and once on the outside). We didn’t have cable so this was riveting entertainment. The garbage men also enjoyed the applause.
Wow! Glad everybody is okay (except for the cars, I guess). Don’t park under poplar trees, either, if you can help it.
I vote for cherries. Or nuts if they grow out there. Walnuts would be divine.
The hubby recently removed a tree from a neighbor’s yard for her–a gorgeous black walnut that came down in a storm. The trunk is about as big as the 2.5 year old is tall–about 3 ft. Most of it is sound wood (very little rotting) and the hubby has some big plans for it….
You have elms? I thought elms were extinct. (srsly)
Well, I mean I knew there were some new variants that had been introduced, but I didn’t really think they had taken hold after Dutch Elm Disease decimated them in the… what….60s? (before you were born, heh)
I’d love a cherry tree, if someone else did the picking and the pitting for me. 🙂
Something really odd just happened with your feed into my Google Reader. Its giving me posts from a blog called Kelly’s Quotidian instead of your posts. And like 9 of them at a time. This is the link to the site: http://kellysquotidian.com/?p=36 Isnt that weird? I am going to unsubscribe to your blog and then re-subscribe and see if that fixes it. Just thought you should be kept in the loop…
Same thing happened to me as with Heather. Oddly, I got a pile of posts from the same site — Kellysquotidian — into Google reader, but I didn’t know where they were coming from. You figured out that it is from Dispatches? Did they stop when you unsubscribed to Dispatches?
Kellysquotidian also showed up for me in Bloglines – 10 entries. A visit to your actual site shows that you’re still here (thankfully!). Very strange, though.