We love trees, but we just don’t know what to do about this.
One of our primary goals here is to grow food in our garden. Almost 1000 square feet of real estate has been dedicated to that for over 30 years. during that time, something has been happening that we hadn’t fully appreciated until this weekend.
The hawthorn tree in the southwest corner of the garden has been here for ages. Of course in the past 30 years, the tree has gotten about twice as tall and much fuller. Now, in 2019, the tree is over 20 feet tall and we can see that it couldn’t be in a worse location.
As the sun passes overhead from east to west, the shadow crosses directly over the garden from west to east. In the photos here, bear in mind that there are no leaves on this tree to speak of yet.
We had hoped that by pruning and trimming the tree pretty severely, we might get by with keeping it there, but for several months out of the year, our established garden space will still fall short of ideal sun exposure.
In retrospect, we’ve noticed that the two blueberry bushes on the west side of the garden haven’t been very productive for the past several years. Furthermore, the raspberries on the east side and the artichoke are thriving because of their extended exposure to the sun.
Our options are limited to moving the garden to another location in the yard, or to remove the tree. The latter seems harsh, but the former seems problematic in other ways such as the amount of work involved as well as creating a garden in the middle of our yard where we do most of our playing and the dogs do most of their fetching.
Tomorrow, a tree specialist will be coming to discuss these matters in more detail.