I've found a good way to find out who your real friends are: go to work and tell people that a tree fell in your yard. The true friends are the ones who stick around to hear the story, knowing full well that you are going to ask them to help clean up the mess!

This tree fell a few weeks ago:





It's actually a bundle of several trees joined at the trunk, and one of them fell. Was it a fierce Nebraska storm? Winds? Tornado? Nope, it just rotted out at the trunk and got tired, I guess. So then I realized just how rotted the rest of the tree bundle was, and it was time to take the whole lot down. Which would be easier to do if I had a chain saw, or a wood chipper, or a truck to haul the rental chipper. But I don't, hence the friends.

So I rented the wood chipper, bribed my pickup truck/chainsaw-owning friends with beer and pizza, and we headed off after work to be lumberjacks for a day.

The chipper looked like this one, which I rented a few years ago:



We got the rest of the tree down without crushing my fence or my neighbor's power lines. Then we fired up the chipper and for a while it was just ripping right through the tree. We could put branches in it that were six inches thick and out shot mulch from the other side like they were nothing. Then, BANG! Rattle rattle, rattle. LOUD rattle! Shards of metal spewing out of the mulch chute. Uh oh. That can't be good.

Now I had tree branches covering my yard and a rental chipper with its blades reduced to jagged little pieces because the bolts holding them on had all sheared in half. Since the rental place was closed, we were done for the night. Crap! (They later refunded my rental fee, so I've got that going for me, which is nice!)

Now, Omaha has a summer yard waste program where they will pick up your tree branches on garbage day and take them to be mulched, as long as you tie them up in neat little bundles, no more than four feet long. I figured I didn't want to hassle my friends with finding another chipper for the third of the tree that was still lying in my yard mocking me, so the next Saturday morning I got up and started cutting and bundling.

I had gotten so scratched up by branches the day we felled the tree that I figured it would be a good idea to wear long pants and sleeves to finish up the work. And maybe you haven't noticed, but it's a hot summer. HOT. And humid. So for three miserable hours I dragged the branches into the shade (where it was probably only 95 degrees instead of 102 in the sun), cut them into four foot lengths and tied them up. Because you can't just leave the branches strewn about the yard, I guess.

Here is the tamed brush pile:
It doesn't look like much after it was all cut up, but it sure sucked at the time!