Our pear tree fell down! How to dress tree wounds?

Jason has always wanted to have a fruit tree.  He used to talk about it all the time in our old house.  So when when we found out that one of the trees in the backyard of our new house was a pear tree we were super excited!

Until it rained and rained and rained one night last week making the soil really soft, and our 20 year old pear tree feel down from the weight of the hundreds of pears on it.  We didn’t even get to enjoy one season of pears!  I forgot to take a picture of our tree when it fell down, so this picture is borrowed from Christmas Notebook.  It kind of looked like this except our tree was more horizontal.

When I was at work the next day, Jason emailed me this next photo and it made me burst out laughing.  He and his brother cut back about 2/3 of the tree, and hoisted it back up.  Apparently they decided to use the kids climber to hold it up!

The trunk didn’t break at all.  There was one big root that looked like it snapped below the soil, but everything looked more bent than anything else.  The tree is still alive, even though it happened a week ago, so we are hoping it will last long enough for us to get some pears next month!

I am not a tree expert, but Jason wanted to cover all the open cuts in the tree to protect them.  I did a quick Google search on how to dress tree wounds and didn’t see this anywhere so I’m not sure if it’s going to work, or if it’s even recommended, but Jason used wax to seal the exposed wood.

We used a tin can to melt it in:

And we put the tin can into a pot of hot water to get it to melt:

So here is an exposed cut:

We brushed on the wax:

Completely covering the cut:

And now hopefully that will protect the end:

Seeing that propping up a tree on our kids’ climber is probably not the safest option, the guys also tethered the tree to two of our fence posts to keep it upright:

Questionable for sure.  I’m not convinced this is the best plan.  Personally, I’m a little paranoid the tree is just going to fall down again someday if we ever take off the tethers?

I’m willing to wait until October to see if we get to enjoy at least a few pears, but I’m seeing that area as a nice place to put a swing set for the girls next year…  🙂

Source : onelittleproject.com
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