Five Wee Trees

After school on Wednesday, Mike and I put the kids to work. We had five trees delivered to our backyard and they needed to get in the ground.

Jake and Mike started working on the first one together:

Maddie and I worked on another project that I'll post about later. After ours was completed, I headed over to work with the boys. Maddie headed out to play with some friends. Jake didn't want to stop helping Mike and me so he continued to try his hand at every bit of planting he could. Towards the fifth tree Mike and I were getting tired of the process and attempted to jump in and handle a couple things before Jake realized what stage we were at. This was met with the utmost resistance on Jake's part. He was not willing to share "his jobs" with us.

Below is Mike putting the finishing touches on tree #2. These are called Norway Maples; we purchased four of these. (And shame on my 100% Norwegian mom who had never heard of these!) They will not get very wide which is good because there is roughly 10 feet of space before the roots would run into the pool. Kudos to Mike for spending hours researching trees. I'm really not sure what he's going to do with his free time now. Kudos to me for not strangling him when we went to figure out where to place them. Mike is a planner. In the process of decided where to plant these, we had to figure out how wide they were going to grow, at what point the branches may/may not overlap each other, and what parts of the outer view we would be blocking. This was figured out with stakes, rocks, measuring tapes and reference notes. Toward the end of this long process he literally couldn't decided between where to place one tree...a span of 12 inches. I just started laughing and looked him in the eye and said, "Mike...you can't plan nature." But he sure as heck gave his best effort to doing just that.

This is the other type of tree we planted. We already have one in our back corner. I can't think of what the name of this one is. But, it has these dark pretty leaves all year round and doesn't change color in the fall. I think it's a fairly slow growing tree.

This is the one we already have in our other corner. I believe we are going into our fourth summer with this tree. I think it will be awhile before the above tree stops looking like a character from a Dr. Seuss book.

In fact, it will be awhile before any of them are providing shade or privacy. We thought we had done a pretty good job of getting some decent sized trees. Then we got up to our deck and I turned around. We realized at that point we really have a Poppa tree and five baby trees.