Fig Trees Begone!

[bjarvis]

Fig trees were an obsession of the family who had our house before we moved in back in 1999. We didn't much care for the trees along the east side of the house but we didn't have any better idea of what to do with the space. kent4str and cuyahogarvr now have some sort of planting idea --expensive, I'm sure-- so we had the trees removed.

Before:


After:

Comments

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

so how did the fig trees get removed? did you employ a local arborist? did you invest in a barrel of Acme^TM Tree-B-Gon^TM? did you come up with the arboreal equivalent of ruby slippers for them? was this the silver spring chainsaw massacre? did kent4str and/or cuyahogarvr get all butch and chop them down? They are lumberjacks and they're OK / they sleep all night and they work all day ?

enquiring minds need to know

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Our lawn-cutting crew also does tree work... it cost $300 or so but we didn't have to do the work, dispose of the tree carcass or worry about the figs' caustic sap dropping on everything.

[kent4str.livejournal.com]

They also put in some herbicide, since the didn't want to grind out the stumps so close to the house. I just hope it works - figs are notoriously hard to kill. We had a small one (about 4') in our previous yard (same landlord planted the damned thing). I spent over a year stripping every leaf that showed, I cut a ring out of the bark under the ground level, I sprayed it with RoundUp, and it still lived. Finally I poured a whole bottle of Lysol concentrate around it and it died.

Then the landlord planted another, the bastard. If he tries that &#^% again I'll sue. Especially since he doesn't own the house any more.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

... and there was me hoping you'd been a Lumberjack! (pressing wild flowers...)

I've not run across outdoor figs (I have a ficus benjamina, but it's in a pot, and that ensures I will always be bigger and can maintain the upper hand); from your evidence, figs are almost as bad as dandelions. or lilac, for that matter.

I spoze if you put grass/lawn around the stump, if cut to/below soil level, it could be controlled easily enough, just keep mowing when you (or the gardening professionals) go by while attending to the grass.

I heard tell (and if you're still feeling bitter about the former landlord, you might want to bear this in mind), one of the nasty horticultural things to do to people (obviously to be done under cover of darkness, or otherwise undetected) is to plant potatoes under the lawn. Stick a spade into the lawn, wiggle it back and forth to create a wedge-shaped hole, drop in a couple of potatoes, stomp the grass flat again, and voila!

Unless the owners of the -er- augmented lawn dig them ALL up (andthereby leave the lawn looking like a groundhog convention, or the site of trench warfare in Flanders, circa 1917) the potatoes keep coming back and coming back and coming back - they don't need to photosynthesise for quite a while, there's a LOT of energy in the tubers / potatoes. it can take two or three years to get rid of them by mowing. Bwa-ha-ha.