you tie up your falling tree with a garden hose and a broken hot water heater!
During a recent storm, part of our tree was stuck leaning over too far and couldn't get back up. We think it is top heavy as it is a tall, thin, yet bushy tree. I don't know what kind it is exactly. I used to know but we refer to it lovingly as the "ShadeMaster 2000" because it has been doing a great job of providing shade where shade needed to be provided. When I saw it leaning and not being able to get back up, there was no way anyone was going to convince me to chop it down. I figured if I could just get it back up in the air, and tie it up somehow, then in the winter when it loses it's leaves, it shouldn't be quite so top heavy.
My first plan was to lean out of the upstairs master bath window with a hook tied on the end of a rope. I could swing it over to the tree and hubby could hook it and I could pull it up while someone wrapped some rope or something around it. (I was grasping here...!) I couldn't find the hook I had in mind and everyone figured one good breeze and I was sure to fall out of the window, so we scrapped that idea.
Finally I told hubby one day that I knew we had an old garden hose that we could use to tie up the tree without damaging it. In my mind, I saw hubby climbing a ladder, wrapping the hose around the tree, then retreating down the ladder to assist me in tugging on the hose to lift the tree, then wrapping the hose the rest of the way around the tree several times to hold it in place...simple, right?
No, not so much. We got as far as both of us tugging on the hose to pull up the tree when we realized it took both of us to hold it. Hubby looked at me calmly and asked "now what?" I thought I knew, but apparently that plan was quickly going out the window.
As luck would have it, we had recently replaced our hot water heater and had yet to dispose of the old one. (I was trying to hide it behind a bouganvilla bush but it wasn't working.) As we stand there holding the tree up wondering "now what?", hubby had a brilliant idea. He leaned a little closer to the hot water heater and screwed the end of the hose on to the drain valve at the bottom. So, I guess our poor tree gets to spend the Fall months hooked up to the hot water heater until such time that it can hold itself upright.
This is what I call Redneck Landscaping. I wish this had happened when Jeff Foxworthy had his show and had the segment where they picked the Redneck "yard of the week". That I think we could have won.
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