Extreme Pruning, Vol. 2

You may recall that earlier this year, shortly after we moved in, we decided to prune the heck out of the mesquite tree in our front yard. Well, the weather turned cool this weekend, so Nathan & I decided it was time to "finish" the job:

I say "finish" in quotation marks because mesquite trees are like big huge desert weeds; they grow like crazy even with minimal water, and I have no doubt that we'll be taking the shears to this tree again sometime in the future. But for now, at least, all the lower dead branches have finally been cleared off.

Notice that there's a lot of pale stumps near the middle bend of the trunk; there was a lot of overgrowth there, and most of it was dead. We think this poor tree had never been properly pruned in all its life. With all the lower branches gone, we can walk up to the front door without being scratched at by low-hanging branches (dead or alive). However, there's still plenty of bushiness in the upper portions of the tree, so the shade factor hasn't been reduced much.

I can still see a small handful of dead branches up in the uppermost branches, but there's no way for us to get up there without a much taller ladder, or a set of pole shears (neither of which we own right now). There are also some branches threatening to rub up against the girls' bedroom window, so someone may have to climb onto the roof to chop those off. Well, I suppose we could hire a professional landscaper, but paying for pruning is for suckers.

Nathan is always a little alarmed when I attack our plants with the pruning shears (every winter, I usually cut all the branches off of our bushes as well). Maybe he's right. However, the plants I prune always spring back fully healthy the following spring, so I'm not worried about doing a little chopping! Besides, I think this tree will thank us for it--probably by sprouting out dozens of new green branches and getting very bushy again before we even realize what's happened.