Ding dong, the tree is dead

We made a flying trip up to the lake house this weekend, spending less than 24 hours, in order to do away with the nasty old tallow trees in our front yard.

Back in the summer, they weren't a nuisance. But I knew where we were headed with this type of tree. The little green berries that fall all over the place. The messy green catkins. Not to mention the large roots of the tree up next to the house that were undoubtedly slowly undermining the slab. 

Thanks to a family friend, who had experience safely killing tallow trees without harming any of the surrounding landscaping, we poisoned them about five weeks ago. Saturday afternoon, we chopped them down and cut them up. Since our local brush recycling center was closed, we had to wait until this morning to haul it all away. Now we'll just let the stumps and root systems continue to die off over the winter so we can grind them out in the spring and replace with some sort of shrubbery.

I swept up lots of dead leaves and twigs, enough to fill three large contractor bags. It's nice to have the trees gone because they were neighborhood eyesores and the shedding leaves were an ongoing mess to deal with.