Tom sent out an email to a select group rather that to blog about it himself, and he pretty much says what I was going to say, so I absconded with his email
I'm sure that many of you have read Deb's blog about the upheaval in our front garden.
It was a gut wrenching decision to remove the palm but we really had no choice.....either now with a lot of work or later with even more work.
Besides the danger of the palm dropping a limb on someone there was the possibility of a heavy wind blowing the tree over and it was plenty big enough to take out part of the front wall.
Anyway, let me make this a little shorter by saying that we had no idea of the root system that a palm has.
We recently had a small idea when we went to plant a small orchid in the front garden and I could not get the shovel in any further than 1 inch. When you have to get a spud bar to dig a small hole the red flag gets run up the old flag pole real fast! Soooooo putting it all together it had to go. :(
I started the digging yesterday but couldn't handle it and had to call in for help.
We're hoping that the vine on the wall will be ok. Since we can't tell what roots belong to whom I cut the roots with my most wonderful Dewalt sawzall one foot out from the wall and then placed the boards there so the worker would not get closer.
Another chance we had to take in order to get the palm and roots out.
And for those of you that are more patient it was estimated that it would take around 6 months for the roots to die and compost with wetting them about every third day. The trunk of the palm left in the ground would take longer than that.
I have attached a picture of the area and the pile of roots that represent just under half of the roots that our palm had just within the small area in our garden. The area is being dug one foot deep so there are more roots below that level.
So that's the story and the redesign begins.
A picture speaks a thousand words, so here's foto documentation of this root system
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| Tom just getting started with lifting the roots |
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| just look at how many |
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| this is all around the trunk |
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| eeeschk! |
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| this is about the time that the handle to the pickax broke, Tom went and bought another handle |
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| this is how Tom left it yesterday |
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| Cristobal has been out there working about 3 hours |
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| almost done, nearly 6 hours of work to get it to this |
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| another 2 hours and this is our new blank canvas we just need to select the centerpiece |
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| and replant all these! |
I've been thinking about bamboo - what do you think??
It would be tall, not destroy the plants on the wall, offer some shade, but still let enough light through for the plants below. Tom doesn't like the leaves it will drop.
or maybe you have an idea????