Trees

I love trees. I love jewelry with trees, picture frames with trees, and the trees in my backyard. As much as I love the trees, I hate bugs. And at the Pitt we have female box elder trees, which means I get to suffer through these guys, in the late summer and fall. It's disgusting. The entire side of our house will be covered in these little red suckers. They don't bite, the don't hurt the tree, they are just there. And once it starts getting colder, they creep into your house.

This year was exceptionally bad for box elders, so we made a big decision to cut out all the female box elders in our yard. 4 big beautiful trees. Since we were having those cut, we also had an apple and huge Siberian elm cut down as well. The apple tree was in a really bad place, and the elm was in danger of falling on our house.

One of the large box elder trees was very close to our property line and I being the good neighbor decided to talk to the neighbors about the tree. This is how the interaction went: 

Orsi proceeds to house with KEEP OUT signs

Neighbor: Are you my neighbor?
Orsi: Yes. I came to talk by about this tree...box elder problem...
Neighbor: I don't care what you do. I hate tree's. I'd cut down every tree in my yard if my wife let me.
Orsi: Ummmm. Great. I really like trees and would miss them if they were gone.

So I guess we don't have to ask the neighbors about future trees and I was happy they were cool with it. So the trees are gone and the yard is pretty bare. With the geo and missing trees, we look pretty rough out there.