We had our own version of that painful movie last weekend. On Saturday, Brian and I went to a local tree auction. It's a wholesale nursery that sells larger-than-average trees, and twice a year they get rid of a bunch of trees at once by hosting an auction. It was crazy fun, and we ended up purchasing 12 trees! There was a catch though. All trees had to be picked up by Sunday afternoon. And the trees are so big, you can't exactly transport and move them yourself. Believe me. We tried.
We borrowed a friend's pickup truck, and another friend's utility trailer. When the guys at the nursery went to load our trees into the trailer with a skid steer, they quickly realized only two of the trees would fit in the trailer at a time. Brian drove the trees onto our property right next to where we wanted to plant them. Brian, Biniam and I then attempted to unload the trees. They. Wouldn't. Budge. Like not even an inch. We were screwed. We had ten more trees to pick up, two that were stuck on the trailer, not to mention twelve giant holes to dig.
Our backup plan was to call the guy who we were buying our boulders from, have him deliver the boulders on Sunday, then pick up the trees for us, and come place the trees in our pre-dug holes. At 5:00 PM on Saturday we connected with "our guy" and made arrangements for him to come deliver our trees at 8:00 Sunday morning. At this point we were starting on our third hole, and had also just found out our first two holes were too small.
Did I mention we were screwed?
We sent out the SOS, and by about 7:00 PM we had two friends-with-shovels helping us out. By dark, I think we had 8 1/2 holes dug. It's a bit blurry to me now, but late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, we got grace as Our Guy called and said it would be closer to noon. Good thing, because we also realized that not only did we have to be ready for our trees, but since he was first dropping off our boulders, we would need to be ready for them, too. Which meant creating a raised berm for some of the boulders to sit on.
Oh...my...word. We were digging and hacking and scooping and wheelbarrow-ing so fast. One neighbor saw what we were doing with the dirt-moving, and came over and dropped off his 4-wheeler with a trailer. That helped a LOT.
We were just working on the last tree hole when Our Guy pulled up with our rocks. He unloaded the rocks, placed them were they needed to go, then took off with Brian to get our trees, while Biniam and I finished up the last hole.
Have I mentioned that these holes were about six feet across and three feet deep?
Everything went smoothly with delivering the trees and placing each one in each hole with the tractor. And our holes were just the right size!
Next up, pictures of our trees. Although they aren't very photogenic right now without their leaves.
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2 comments:
Can't believe you left us all hanging like that.
I want to see some ASH!!!
There was a catch though. All trees had to be picked up by Sunday afternoon. And the trees are so big, you can't exactly transport and move them yourself. Believe me. We tried.
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