Tree service in Blaine, New Market & Strawberry Plains

Two jobs on one property, priced separately and worked that way.

The side yard came first: two maples out completely, and two more trimmed back moderately rather than reduced hard — enough to push new growth without taking the shape off them.

The rest was the river. A restoration along the property line, which in practice means taking everything below about twenty-five feet off the trees screening the river, plus the dead limbs along the line, then trimming and chipping the whole run. Most of that is lift work rather than climbing, wherever the machine can reach.

One hackberry was hanging over the patio and came out entirely.

Brush was chipped on site.

The septic tank sat between the house and the driveway. That is the short route from the road to the front yard, and it is exactly where a spider lift and a loaded chipper would have gone if nobody had looked first.

Nothing went that way. The lift and the chipper were both routed around the back of the house and brought up to the maple from the far side. It cost distance and it cost time, and it is the difference between a tree removal and a septic repair.

Ground protection mats went down wherever the lift set up. A spider lift puts its whole weight through four outrigger feet, which is what makes it usable on turf at all, but only with something underneath those feet to spread the load.

The maple itself came out of the front yard in sections. Small-diameter limbs went through the chipper and stayed on the property, blown into the spot the homeowner had marked out. The usable firewood was hauled down the road to a neighboring property at the homeowner’s direction. The stump was cut to within about five inches of the ground.

Route planning is most of what a spider lift buys you. The machine fits where a bucket truck cannot, but only if somebody has walked the ground first and knows what is buried under it.

Three Bradford pears, all three out completely, and the first thing to settle was the chips.

Bradford pear makes a lot of volume for the size of the tree. The chip truck holds nine cubic yards, and three trees of this size were going to produce two to three truckloads of material. So the homeowner was asked up front how much of it they wanted to keep — some, all or none — and disposal was arranged for the rest in advance rather than sprung on anybody at the end of the day.

Trees two and three were the ones that needed the lift. Both stood close enough to structures that letting sections fall was not worth the risk, so the spider lift went in and the wood came down under control instead.

Getting the lift back there was its own piece of the job. The route ran along a marked path to the rear of the property and in through the fenced back yard, with ground protection mats laid down along the way. A back lawn behind a fence is not a work yard, and it does not recover well from being treated as one.

All three stumps were flush cut to within three to five inches of the ground.

The septic area was the one thing on that property that could not be crossed. Nothing crossed it.

A dead oak in a front yard is a clock running down. This one had the roof behind it and the power lines running underneath.

Dead wood is the reason for the lift. A climber reads a tree by putting weight on it, and a dead oak gives back very little worth reading. The lift put the saw where it needed to be and kept the load off the stem.

With lines below and a roof behind, the sections came off small and were lowered on rigging rather than dropped. Nothing was thrown clear of that tree at any point in the day.

Ground protection mats went down under the lift before it moved. A front lawn is the part of a property the owner looks at every morning, and a machine crossing it without mats leaves marks that outlast the memory of the tree.

Branches and limbs went into the truck and off the property. The trunk stayed. The homeowner asked for it cut to size and left on site, and that is what happened — one day on the property, and a stack of oak still sitting there when the crew pulled out.