Just A Little Off The Top… I Said A LITTLE Off The Top

You might not know to look at this, but two hours prior it was a thriving, happy twenty-five foot high plum tree, with wide ranging branches drinking in the sunlight, laden with mostly green plums. Truthfully, I thought it was a peach tree that, for twenty-five years produced juicy, smooth purple peaches. No, I’m not a green guy. My wife would point out which Lowe’s tree to put in the truck and where to dig the hole in the yard, and I would blindly comply.

A problem tree, it grew into a land bridge, facilitating the migration of many undesirable mammals from yard to roof. Was that a bad thing? I cannot think of an innocent reason for a chipmunk, squirrel, raccoon, or bobcat to be up there passing the time, when I know they were looking for a place to get access to the attic. Additionally, because the steward of fruit trees… me, missed the insecticide and blight prevention cycle in the spring, It was covered with tent caterpillars and black knot fungus.

The best time to prune trees is when they are dormant. Winter would be nice, as would early spring, but not being a green guy, and with a busy summer and fall schedule, I took a shot. I had two pear trees that used to get black bight no matter the treatment. I trimmed those until they looked like tent poles, chainsawed them down to the nub, and yet they quickly grew back as trees from their subterranean stumps. Could plum trees be any different?

So I snipped the branches with tent caterpillars, dousing the little green squirmies in a handy bucket of diesel fuel… unlit. Then I went for the black knot blighted branches. A little here, a little there. Snip, snip, chain whirls, chain whirl. Lop, Lop. Almost perfectly shaped, with the exception of one branch that stuck out just a tad. Swack. OK, the tree was uneven, so something from the other side… Damn! OK, that looked terrible and it kept getting worse.

Plums began to rain down on me. Big green and purple golf balls, at a rate of, well, d = v₀t + (1/2)gt². Their apparent speed felt faster when they began beating me profusely about the head and ears. Still, it did not stop me from soldiering on; swack, lop, whirl. Right up until the tree’s canopy exploded into a cloud of now homeless hornets. My mother never raised a fool… well, with the exception of my sisters, so I exited at a dead run, in search of a spot under the sky where the horde did not maintain air superiority.

No one looks good running at my age, regardless shape or conditioning. One fist full of sweatpants waistband, pulled upwards so they didn’t fall down. The other hand alternated between swatting wildly at Satan’s swarm, and providing some semblance of balance and ballast to my wide eyed, panic driven sprint. A smushy plum found its way into the heel of my sneaker, which set me into a somewhat asymmetrical, slow motion gallop. Run old man! Run!

Making it around the house to the garage, overhead doors too slowly closing, I found semi-sanctuary. Prepared for just such an eventuality, tree down, garage doors closed, hornets beating against the doors to gain entrance… kind of  like marauding aliens in almost any scene from Stargate SG-1 where the crew was trapped in a compartment of a Goa’uld Ha’taks, and a mass of Replicators were eating their way through the door… Where was I? Oh yeah.

I had several incredibly toxic, heavy duty, outdoor rated, insect bombs on a shelf. With the overhead doors under siege, I grabbed two cans, exited through the garage’s backdoor, worked my way around the farmer’s porch until the tree and fallen branches were in sight just beyond the porch railing. For all of the hornets attacking the front garage doors, there was an even larger contingent guarding the remains of their fallen plum tree home.

I pulled the pin on one bomb and lobbed it into the near cluster of hornets. They shifted farther north and took another stand. I lobbed the second canister directly under them. They began to sputter and drop like… dead hornets. Most went down in flames, some fled to the surrounding woods with their spirit clearly broken. The formation attacking the garage doors must have heard the battle of the plum trees raging on, and came to assist.  With the gas well deployed, none escaped. It was a horrific scene.

A monument to all… 

The remains of the plum tree may not look like much now, but picture it twenty-five feet high, dense branch growth yielding plums the size of Roma tomatoes. Yes, exactly like it was before I attempted pruning, but without the hornets, tent caterpillars and assorted fungi. A few years. You’ll see.