Mark's Blog: Amateur Arborism

You have one new message: 7.33am
From: Pete
"Cherry picker at KL. Serious tree cutting planned"

And so it was that a few hours later I found myself wearing a harness, gloves, protective gloves and a cowboy hat, about 3 stories high on the end of a cherry picker armed with a hand saw.

Pete had decided on Saturday that he was going to remove the branches from the gum tree outside Wayne and Denise's house, before they returned from Tamworth and the Hunter Valley later that day; and after a few beers on Australia Day, I had agreed to help. Eucalyptus trees are non-deciduous, but they regularly drop dead branches. Given the size of this particular tree, and the fact that a number of branches overhang the driveway and roof of the house, it was only a matter of time before they did some serious damage.

So Pete and I spent about five hours positioning and going up on the cherry picker to remove major branches as well as some dead ones (positioning the outriggers is the most important bit for fairly obvious reasons), then coming down, repositioning, and doing it all again. The highest we went was about 12m (the highest it would let us go), well above the height of the house. It was fine, although I found it best not to look down, especially when we were at an angle and the base was not directly underneath us. We hacked the branches off with a hand saw as the chainsaw didn't work - probably a good thing really, given (as you can see from the pictures) it was rather cosy up there for two. For the really thick branches we needed to take it in turns to cut through, for others one had to grab/direct the falling branch to ensure it didn't fall anywhere that could cause damage.

Anyway, by 4pm it was mission accomplished - human life, the house, cars, and dignity intact.