Blog de Puree

Finally, the forsythia bushes are gone!

No more grappling with these oversized monsters when I mow the lawn. No more blocking the dogwood and golden chain trees of the sun’s precious rays. No more harboring of hordes of little house sparrows that chase other birds from our feeders.

Last summer, I cut all the branches of one of the forsythias down to the stump. By mid summer, it had grown back to be about four feet tall. In the fall, I hacked away at all three of them and by late this spring, they had grown back to be four feet tall. Here’s a previous post from last summer to compare a before and after.

This past Saturday, my friend Marc and I took a few hours in the morning and dug out the three forsythia bushes on the western side of the yard. With shovels and pick mattocks, we started wide holes around the bushes. Then we worked our way in towards the bottom of the base of the root system. As we hacked through particularly nasty roots and dug through the clay, we loosened each shrub from its position and rolled it out of the hole.

Paul and Marc hack away the forsythia root system entrenched in clay.

Once the bushes were out of the holes, we cut away at dirt within the root balls, cut off any long chunks of stump and carted everything off to the dump.

Rolling the forsythia stump out of the ground.

And of course, it rained again during one of my major yard projects. Never fails. But hey, no more forsythia bushes!

Piece of cake!