behold, the burning bush

I have written before about 3 smallish Leland Cyprus trees in the front yard that slowly died from disease.
They looked horrible and I have been intending to cut them down since last spring but kept avoiding it, because I knew it would be a scratchy, itchy job with all those dry needles on the trees.

I had an idea to just light them on fire and burn the needles off!  I mentioned it to the Sasquatch when he was here...and he was right on it!    We just balled up a couple of newspaper pages and stuck them in the branches and lit them.

 This is all the same tree. We did them one at a time, even though it would have been neat to see all three burning at once. We aren't reckless!

Woosh! fast burning!

The Sasquatch was going to bring his chainsaw next time and cut down the remaining trunks, but the next day I wanted to see if I could dig them up instead. It seems like no matter how close to the ground you cut with a chainsaw - the stump will heave up and you can't mow over it.

So it turns out they were easy to dig up.  Well maybe not easy, but do-able.

I used my cordless Sawzall with this special pruning blade to cut through the roots. Perfect for the job since the blade is somewhat flexible. 

But my battery ran down after digging up two trees, and the saw battery ran down too!  So there is one tree left to finish up.

The only disadvantage to burning ahead ...handling the blackened remains. I had black soot on my clothes and all over me. It went right through my gloves.

But the soot still isn't as bad as dealing with those scratchy evergreen needles.