Several years ago a squirrel, or more likely a blue jay, buried an acorn in the middle of our back yard. Sam saw that it had sprouted and put a little fence of sticks around it to alert me to leave it be. Before I understood the magnitude of what was happening, I acquiesced. It was little. "Oaks grow very slowly," I told myself. I should have put my foot down right then, on top of that treelet.Fast forward to August 2008. That tree is pretty darn big. It is shading what we would like to call our vegetable garden. More importantly to me, it is blocking the sky. Now I do put my foot down. The tree must go. Sam sadly sees my point. I'm sad too, because the tree means so much to him. We had recently done some research and decided it was a California black oak. Now it had an identity and birds regularly sit on it's branches. Still, I wanted it out of there. Obviously I have a ruthless side.
We called ArborTech (Ben) to look at another tree that might need thinning (think vegetables). I mentioned that we also wanted to take down this adolescent black oak. Without hesitation, Ben said, "We can move it." I could hardly believe it, but he assured me that a friend of his was about to pay a nursery $350 for a tree that size. "I'm sure he'll be glad to have this one for free." That's how we met Barrett and his friend. The story unfolds below. It took these hardy young men most of the day. They smiled a lot, letting me know that they had not outgrown playing in the dirt and doing the next to impossible, moving a very big tree to it's new home on Faith St.
