Yes, I know, It's not Arbor day. But, we were forced by red-tape to plant two, 3" caliper trees by Monday for the Constructions Inspection..and we found this out Friday evening at dinner. Yesterday we planted a Lace Bark Elm, (picture to follow later in this post) but today we spent the afternoon, shopping for this baby.
This is a 6 year old Shatung Maple, and you can read all about it and other maple trees here:
I was surprised to discover, while researching maple trees, that there are 125 different species of maple trees. Most people think of the normal garden variety of maple, with the big star shaped leaf, when you mention maple. This particular maple does great in clay soil (which we have) and tolerates full sun & dry ground, although it prefers to not dry completely out. 
It was so big, that it's root ball filled the entire bed of the truck. The nursery loaded it with a forklift. We decided we'd forgo the delivery fee and figure out how to get it out of the truck once we got it home. As we were driving very slow down back roads to get home with this massive tree, every horse, mule, donkey and cow we passed, spooked and ran. I guess they found it rather odd to see a tree moving down the road. I thought it was rather humorous.
It took a big hole for that big root ball and i was so grateful that we still had the backhoe from yesterday to dig the hole for it. On top of the clay, we have dry clay, which makes the ground like rock. It would've been virtually impossible to dig a hole this large with a shovel.
I give up. I gave up more than once this weekend.
first, we decided to back the truck up to the hole we'd dug, tie a rope around the root ball and the other end of the rope to the bobcat, and pull the tree out of the bed of the truck. Sounds like it would work...doesn't it?
The rope broke...#1 broke..the yellow one in bottom left picture..and rope worked, but it was pulling the bed liner out of the truck with the tree, so we had to go to plan B. Meanwhile Jay showed up...our neighbor from across the street and hooked a wench up and Carl tried that. No go, still was pulling the bed liner out.
Next, they decided to put their heads together and put the wench strap around the root ball and hook the strap to the bucket of the bulldozer and lift the tree out of the truck or lift it up, while Jay pulled the truck out from under the tree.
Thankfully, we measured twice, and the depth was perfect. Good thing, cause this baby wasn't coming back out of that hole!
And here she stands...staked really, really well on 4 sides to protect it from the constant wind.
This completes our tree project for he weekend, whew. I about sweated to death!
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