When we bought our house we knew that the backyard was an issue. It is barren. It's to be expected considering a tornado ripped every living thing out of the ground.
Our builder put sod down in the front and side yards and about 20 feet into the backyard. That leaves over 2/3 of the backyard as dirt. Dirt with rocks and tornado debris. And no trees. There is nothing with any height besides the telephone poles.
(Here is the back of our house. You can see where the pretty green sod begins.)
Naturally, I was so excited when I heard from our realtor that the City of Joplin was offering free trees to residents in the Tornado Recovery area. Each home is allowed up to 3 trees. Woohoo!
Now, can you believe it that Jaymes was against this idea at first? I mean, look at our backyard! It's a wasteland! It needs a little something something, if you know what I'm saying. His reasons were that he didn't want to have to deal with raking the leaves in the fall and mowing around them.
Needless to say, I won this argument. I mean this is an amazing opportunity to great free (FREE!) trees and save ourselves hundreds of dollars. Plus, this will really improve our curb appeal, since we have a corner lot, and our home's resale value.
We compromised a little, I agreed to only get 2 trees.
We don't get to choose specifically what species of tree we are having planted, but we did get to choose between shady trees or utility friendly trees. Utility friendly trees are smaller, they shouldn't grow to be taller than 25 feet. This is to hopefully keep them from growing into the power lines and needing to be trimmed every year. Utility companies spend millions trimming trees every year.
We opted to go with the utility friendly trees. Both to appease my tree-adverse husband and to sort of give back to the City of Joplin. They helped us by treeing up our backyard so why not help them out and save them some cash.
Our next step was to call 1-800-DIG-RITE to have all of our utilities marked.
Now, we just have to decide where to have the trees placed. What do you think?
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