Coffee heat rising

Dollars and Tree$

Big ole’ storm is building up to the north. Kinda doubt it will blow down this way, even though it looks mighty threatening. The mountains just to the north of us — hills, really, but big enough to create a rain shadow — usually block incoming from that direction. Our most vigorous storms usually come in from the southeast or the southwest. Although…fortunately the most recent freshet, the one that blew down a 60-food-plus Aleppo pine, did fly in from the north. If it had come in from the south, it would have blown that tree right down on the homeowner’s house. And that would’ve been an even bigger-dollar event than it was.

Turns out that when a tree that size blows down across a city street, the city has the US Forest Service come and cut it up. But the homeowner has to pay to have the debris hauled off. Apparently they’ll pile it up on your yard, but you have to find a way to get rid of it!

And good luck with that.

Apparently, too, if your tree falls on the neighbor’s house, your homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover it. The person whose house is smashed has to try to get their homeowner’s to cover it.

“And again I say…” good luck with that. Presumably if your neighbor isn’t insured — or not adequately insured to cover the damage — you’ll end up in court fighting over the damages.

devil-pod-treeI’ve been thinking for awhile that I should have the west-side devil-pod tree removed before it drops a limb (or itself) on my house or Terri’s. Even though I don’t think (right now) it poses much of a hazard — it has been thinned, and yesterday I inspected from a distance and think the wind can blow through it all right — it has got to be the single messiest, dirtiest, junkiest tree in all of God’s creation. Whatever it can dump on the house and on your roof, it dumps.

A wind from the north would, if the tree does decide to break despite being trimmed and thinned out, drop it on the fence between the side yard and the front yard. Actually, it wouldn’t even do that: it would fall on the paloverde tree and smush it. Falling due south or due north would not bring it down on either one of our houses. But if it fell to the east or the west, it would cause some serious damage.

It provides a lot of shade on the west side of the house. It’s now so tall that it shades my roof in the afternoon and Terri’s in the morning. So if I take it down, we’re both going to enjoy even more extravagant power bills than we already get…and mine was pushing $300 last month. It will take several years for another tree to grow big enough to shade that west wall, and one that won’t cause any damage if it breaks would never get big enough to shade the roof.

I’d like to replace it with a desert willow, which a lovely plant. Some of them bear pink or purple blossoms. It’s about as xeric as a tree can get — extremely drought tolerant — and it can stand winter temperatures as low as 10 degrees. The one I have in front is gorgeous.

Problem is a desert willow doesn’t get very big — certainly not tall enough to shelter the roof from the afternoon sun. It’ll get maybe 25 feet high. And it’s pretty slow growing. You can get them from landscaping nurseries that are fairly mature, but it’s quite the project to plant such a thing. Presumably would require a crane to lift it over the wall…for that matter, I can’t even imagine how they’d get it around or over the paloverde tree back there.

I don’t even want to know what any such endeavor would cost!

So… It may be best to leave bad enough alone. Get Luis back up there this fall, only this time browbeat him until he agrees to seal every cut with tree tar. (He resists…and the damned willow acacia does not heal where a limb has been cut off. Result: it drips molasses-like black sap on the the ground, not for a little while but permanently. Forever!)

* * * *

Whoa! Several hours later, and it’s really dark and threatening in the west. It’s unusual for a storm to blow in from the west…even stranger than one coming down from the north. Hm.

What do you suppose could have possessed Satan and Proserpine (the house’s previous owners) to plant something like that tree so close to the house? It’s just a few feet off the west edge of the patio, and maybe 18 or 20 feet from the house’s wall. That just seems so mind-bogglingly stupid.

Welp, they were very naive about outdoor plantings. They put two sissou trees in front, which they imagined would never get much more than 15 or 20 feet high. The pattern fits the sales methods indulged by Moon Valley Nurseries, the used-car dealers of the nursery business in this state. They high-pressure you to buy a “package” of a half-dozen trees, about four of which you don’t need. And I’m sure when they saw those two turkeys waddle in, they figured they’d found a place to dump the junk smarter buyers declined to consider.

People are dumb.

Speaking of the smarter parts of God’s creation: I’d better feed those dogs now, so they can wring themselves out in the yard before that storm gets here.

And so…away!

 

Trees

How does the Devil-Pod Tree add work to my life? Let me count the hours…

The late great shamal made a fine mess of the pool. Yesterday I spent several hours shoveling out leaves, pods, pollen, and dirt, another hour running to the pool store and dropping $30 on shock treatment and a new skimmer basket (the old one having cracked under the weight of all the gunk it collected!), more time applying said chemicals. Tomorrow I’ll have to backwash and recharge the filter, now that the dirt, dust, and pollen have lodged themselves in the filter.

Ah, yes, the Devil-Pod Tree, named in honor of the house’s feckless previous owner, Satan.

Satan and his fabled wife Proserpine betook themselves to Moon Valley Nursery, the used-car lot of the arborist bidness, where they succumbed to that worthy organization’s time-honored move-it-off-the-lot package: six trees at a stupidly low per-tree cost. Or so it seems. “Stupid” is the term best suited, however, to the buyer. Five of the six trees were totally unsuited for the places where S & P wanted to plant them. A ten-minute Google search would have revealed this, had our happy homeowners been gifted with the faintest intellectual curiosity.

Moon Valley fibbed baroquely to Satan and Proserpine; either that, or those two lied hilariously to me. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The result was the same: someone (read “moi”) had to get rid of the junk shrubbery.

A few months before they put their house on the market, Satan and the lovely Proserpine purchased two young sissoo trees. They believed, or said they believed, that these monsters would never grow much larger than the ten feet or so to which they had aspired by the time I came on the scene.

Sissoo trees can reach 60 feet in height. The canopy grows to 40 feet in diameter. It is a thirsty plant, requiring weekly deep-watering. Its roots will lift sidewalks and heave foundations. It propagates by root suckers. Satan and Proserpine, apparently believing the fiction that these were modest little things, planted two of them side-by-side in the front yard.

Good move. Better move: I had these pulled out when I relandscaped the front yard.

Then they had Moon Valley’s barely paid crew plant an exotic pine tree, which they believed to be petite and noninvasive, directly next to the eastside wall. Another good move: this thing rises to a good 40 or 50 feet and gets far too large to fit into the space between the house’s east wall and the public sidewalk. I had that critter removed, too. Replaced it with a Texas ebony. It bites, but it doesn’t heave the foundation.

Then they planted two willow acacias, an unbeautiful import from Australia described by the most recent arborist to visit the property as “not recommended.” This is the plant that has richly earned the name “Devil-Pod Tree.” Satan calculated the direction and velocity of the Sonoran desert’s prevailing monsoon gales and then planted one of the damned things directly upwind of the pool.

The Devil-Pod Tree drops seeds that deposit yellow stains on the pool’s plaster. Its long, strappy leaves clog the pool cleaner. And its UNHOLY yellow fuzzballs fly into the pool, where they demonstrate that they are heavier than water by sinking to the bottom, there to be lapped up by Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, who straightaway delivers them to the pump pot.

Dare to try to collect them in the water-driven hose bonnet, and you shiver them apart into zillions of tiny pieces, which explode into the water like dust in the air only to settle back on the bottom in multizillions of tiny particles. Either way, when these things are sucked into the skimmer basket and the pump strainer, they clog the system with a vengeance. Let them get through those two barriers, and they fill up the filter medium, presenting the homeowner with the immediate pleasure of a backwash job.

It is, in short, a nasty tree.

Satan and Proserpine planted two of them, one next to the pool and the other over on the west side, where it could threaten to crash down on the house whenever a stiff breeze comes out of the setting sun. These trees are as brittle as eucalyptus, and every bit as capable of shedding large, roof-shattering chunks.

The tree that has grown by the pool is actually not unaesthetic, as willow acacias go. It’s relatively shapely and it casts some nice shade on the patio. None on the house, alas, but some on the concrete. That’s not bad, because a slab of concrete accentuates the effect of a 115-degree day by radiating heat into the adjacent foundation and onto the wall of your house, jacking up your air-conditioning bills commensurately.

Nevertheless. Every time I have to spend upwards of an hour cleaning its mess out of the pool, I think it needs to go.

Then there are the damnable palm trees.

What on earth possesses people to plant palm trees????  What is the appeal to these hideous, filthy, roach-ridden, termite-attracting sticks? They are the filthiest goddamn things! And they require annual trimming, to the tune of $50 to $100 apiece, depending on whether you can find an undocumented immigrant to do the job or whether you’re forced to hire a recently released American ex-convict.

These little gems drop rock-like seeds into the pool, there to break your pool cleaner. This happens after they have released several million sharp-edged nasty little flower things to clog the filter. The tree trimming guys hack this stuff off in the late spring, along with enough of the canopy to totally eradicate what little shade the ghastly things might have cast over your pool and yard. Soon enough, they shoot up some more flowering rods, which drop some more razor-edged blossoms and rock-like seeds into the pool. In the course of trimming off fronds, the tree guys leave behind large, shield-shaped attachments, which sit on the trunk and dry up. Comes the next stiff breeze, these huge, dirty, thorned nuisances blow off and alight in your pool and all over the street. You as the homeowner get to pick up all this filthy debris.

Cockroaches adore palm trees. If you have a palm tree or two, you will have roaches. That’s why you’ll observe handsome and active Gila woodpeckers working the trunks and canopies: they’re gorging themselves on fat little snacks.

Desert termites like palm trees, too. Late in the summer these charming creatures swarm, much like their cousins the ants. They build mud nests on the sides of these palm trees, temporary homes where they reside while deciding which human shack to settle into.

The various previous owners of the House from Hell have planted not one, not two, not three, but FIVE palm trees around that pool.

So. What we have here are six exceptionally messy trees discharging trash into the already plenty workful pool.

My desire, if not my plan (only because I can’t afford my desire), is to uproot all six of them. Replace the hated acacia with an emerald paloverde, itself a moderately messy creature but as nothing compared with the incumbent. The two palm trees might be replaced by a Swan Hill olive, if there’s a way to determine how aggressive its roots are around an underground pool.

All trees, of course, drop one thing or another, and usually several things. But palm trees as poolside foliage are a mystification. And the willow acacia: nonstop horror show!

Removing them? $$$$$$$