First Job completed.

I had my first paying customer last week.

Last week I carried out my first arb job. It wasn’t a massive job by any stretch of the imagination but it was the first paid tree surgery work that I’ve done. The tree in question was a Japanese Maple. You can see that it dominates the front garden and when it has foliage, makes the front room very dark as it blocks all the direct sunlight.

It was supposed to be a pruning job and I’d proposed the following with the preference for the tree being the soft pruning.

The customer wanted to take it down to the extreme pruning level. I was happy to do that, but the tree would have responded with a lot of vertical shoots. Here’s an example below. I found this lying around the grounds of my college. The fact that it’s on the ground makes the point. At some stage this would have been pruned heavily, then the tree responded with these shoots, then someone realised it looked awful and then removed the tree.

So ultimately the customer decided to remove the tree and replace it autumn with a smaller dwarf weeping Japanese Maple. As we’re right at the end of tree planting season, I didn’t want to chance putting a new one in the ground. Trees are not cheap and as I understand it, they are best put into the ground before the first frost.

Here’s the job half way through. One fun fact about tree work – there is always somewhere to hang something.

I didn’t bring my climbing gear for this job, but I did end up climbing the tree as it made it easier to cut the higher branches without anything hitting the windows. Most of the job was done using a handheld saw, only the last part was done using a chainsaw. Using a chainsaw in an urban environment was thrilling.

The completed job – let there be light.

I was asked to leave a significant portion on two of the stumps for tying a hammock onto over the summer.

I learned two things. One, I definitely enjoy this kind of work. The deal I’ve made with the universe is that I won’t actively seek work until I have completed my college course and have the specific tickets and qualifications to do that job. However, I won’t turn it down if it knocks on my door and I can do it with my current qualification and tickets. The second thing I’ve learned is that I need a chipper before I do another job. And before anyone asks, I disposed of this waste correctly. It was not fly tipped.

One thing that I plan on doing for customers is to make them some form of token item from their tree. Wood is wood after all and whilst a small multi-stemmed tree like this one isn’t exactly great for timber, it is none the less made out of wood. So I’ve taken a few pieces of this wood and I’ll be making the customer a keepsake from their tree. In order to do this I had to mill up a branch on the bandsaw so that the wood can dry out over the next few months. I think this may have been the smallest bit of saw-milling ever carried out on planet earth. The wood looks lovely - a clear white. I should at the very least be able to get a few key rings and a nice small box out of this.

I’ll be back at this job in the autumn to remove the stump on the existing tree (no more hammock) and to plant a new tree. One that won’t nuke all of the light.