BUCKTHORN!!!

Most of the people we know who live in the twin cities area don't have many trees in their yard, heck most people we know in the cities can COUNT how many trees they have in their yard. Granted, we could probably count ours too - it would just take some time and some creativity around the property line.

So having trees is GREAT - love it, would not want to live some where without a lot of trees. However it became apparent to us that we had many buckthorn trees - a very invasive tree (read about buckthorn here). So we decided it was finally time to remove many of these invasive trees from our yard. Turns out that was around 70 trees. So in less than 24 hours we removed 70 trees, rented a wood chipper for 2 hours, wood chippered all 70 trees (in less than two hours!), and then put stump remove on the trees we were unable to pull out. Needless to say we are beat.

...But now we have little to no buckthorn, which really opens up the woods around our place and a huge pile of wood chips. I'm sad about the woods not having as much coverage - but the trees that were getting choked by the buckthorn should start to grown better and it also leaves room for us to plant trees we want!