Should I remove trees from my yard?

[Anonymous]

My dad spends at least a couple thousand each year getting trees removed from his acre lot. I only have 1/2 an acre and back to parkland - remove the trees.

It's cheaper to remove them before they fall and hit something. With the wind earlier this week we had another tree split. I'm still waiting for the county to fix some trees that snapped with the duracho that will fall on my house when they start to rot (but I have my figers crossed that they will land on my 30 year old screened in porch - and we'll fix that project with an upgrade!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love trees, but even a healthy tree can fall in a really bad storm. Our neighbor's 60-foot oak tree fell on our house during the derecho of 2012 - they had no reason to believe it wasn't healthy, and it certainly had looked healthy. It did a lot of damage, most of which was covered by insurance. (though I had to go out of pocket for a few very expensive things, and my daughter and I both could have been killed.)

You can't control for everything, and you definitely don't want to remove all your trees, but I can see some value in taking out a couple that are nearest the house and leaning in that direction.

what kind of things were they?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My dad spends at least a couple thousand each year getting trees removed from his acre lot. I only have 1/2 an acre and back to parkland - remove the trees.

It's cheaper to remove them before they fall and hit something. With the wind earlier this week we had another tree split. I'm still waiting for the county to fix some trees that snapped with the duracho that will fall on my house when they start to rot (but I have my figers crossed that they will land on my 30 year old screened in porch - and we'll fix that project with an upgrade!)

Wow, how trashy of you to expect the taxpayers to "upgrade" you white trash screen porch. I work for the county, I will let them know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My dad spends at least a couple thousand each year getting trees removed from his acre lot. I only have 1/2 an acre and back to parkland - remove the trees.

It's cheaper to remove them before they fall and hit something. With the wind earlier this week we had another tree split. I'm still waiting for the county to fix some trees that snapped with the duracho that will fall on my house when they start to rot (but I have my figers crossed that they will land on my 30 year old screened in porch - and we'll fix that project with an upgrade!)

Wow, how trashy of you to expect the taxpayers to "upgrade" you white trash screen porch. I work for the county, I will let them know.

What is wrong with you? If the trees are on the strip between the curb and sidewalk then they are county property. The county or ulilty companies deal with them after storms.

[Anonymous]

Casey Trees is a highly reliable source of information if you qualify for their services. If not, perhaps you can pay them? In our case, the arborists and Casey staffer said exactly the same things about our trees.

[Anonymous]

My owner/landlord (we rent) removed about 5 huge oak trees from our 1/2 acre backyard. Now it floods terribly in any type of rain. Beware.

[Anonymous]

That is a good quote. I think you should probably do it. The truth is, you will never really know for certain whether a tree is going to fall until it does. We moved into our new house last summer and were concerned about one of the trees in our backyard. We had a certified arborist come out and take a look - and he said it was perfectly healthy. Flash forward to the first ice storm that hit this winter when I was awoken at midnight to huge crashing sounds that lasted over 2 hours. In the morning, we discovered that ALL of the branches on this "perfectly healthy" tree had come down - some missing our house by mere inches. We brought another certified arborist to cut it down as soon as weather permitted - at a cost of $3,000 for the ONE tree. We ended up taking another tree down a few months later over similar concerns -- it looked healthy enough, but was leaning toward our house. Turned out when the arborist began cutting he discovered that the entire trunk was rotted from the inside...so it was probably a good thing that we took it down. I hated to do it - I come from the PacNW and really miss having beautiful old growth trees in my backyard - but safety first.