Saturday, July 21, 2012

Lost a black walnut tree to thousand cankers disease

I am kitty and my butt approves of this tree stump.
So yesterday, I woke up to the sounds of a chainsaw...in my own front yard. Mile High Tree Care had came out to cut down one of the black walnut trees that are in my yard.

The reason that it had to be cut down was that the tree had caught the thousand cankers disease (fungus) that is expected to kill off all the black walnut trees here in Colorado within five years.

Those brown leaves showing up is a sign that your tree is diseased.
The city of Denver is asking...and then issuing fines...to get people to remove their infected black walnut trees in a timely manner.

I am not happy about this disease. This tree was a nice tree, and fairly old (I am guessing that it was planted at the time this area was developed, so it was 60 to 70 years old I think).

The team work was amazing.
I will admit that I was impressed by the amount of time they needed to take down the entire tree. It was only a half hour to forty-five minutes before they were completely done.

The sad part is that I still have another black walnut tree...and I like it. As I said, I am not happy about the disease.

My other black walnut tree.
After Mile High Tree Care finished with my tree, they pulled across the street and cut down one in my neighbor's yard. I imagine that my neighbor is not any more happy than I am about the situation.

So now, I have a rahter large tree stump in the front of my yard. My wife thinks that she is going to use it to sit on while gardening, but I think that one of the cats has already claimed it.

It was a fairly large tree as you can see from this photo.

2 comments:

DogsDontPurr said...

I don't know a lot about this, but I recently read that the wood from these trees can be quite valuable. You might actually be able to sell it for several hundred dollars...or even a few thousand depending on the size of the tree. You might want to google around a bit before you have any of your other trees hauled away.

Again, I don't know the specifics, but it might be worth looking at.

Morgan Drake Eckstein said...

Because the state of Colorado is trying to stop the spread of the disease, the only thing that you can legally do with the wood is to send it to the local "safe" storage area. You cannot use it as firewood, or sell it, or anything like that.