When I planted this Trachycarpus thirteen years ago it was only 80cm high and I didn't really think about it's eventual height. As you can see from the first picture it was less than half a metre below the power and electricity supply cable to the house.
There is no way I could have done it without the machine and even with all it's grunt it put up a lot of fight.
Despite making a square metre of root ball I had to chop lots of roots so it will be a big shock to it's system, fingers crossed it survives
I also used the machine to help me dig out a couple of bamboo clumps. There aren't many bits of me that don't ache this morning.
You had the look of a man enjoying himself there Andy, Hopefully it wont even notice its been moved.
I do wonder when looking at other planting pictures on various forums what happens when the palms grow, many do seem to be shoe horned into very small spaces - perhaps others bite the bullet before you did :)
Looks like a jobwell done, Andy. Did you remove any of the lower leaves to relieve some of the stress on the palm?
EDIT: Actually, looking at the pictures again side-by-side I can tell that some leaves have been removed.
What the pictures don't show though, is how you actually moved the palm once it was dug out. I presume the new planting hole was dug along side and you only moved it a few feet to clear the cables.
Last edited by simon on Fri May 03, 2013 10:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
It was good fun, except for the bits I had to do by hand. The hard part of using the machine was keeping my concentration, so many levers which did different things depending on which direction you pushed them, there were one or two near misses.
The palm was moved about 3metres, from where it is in the second picture to hole directly behind the machine. To move it I had to dig a ramp behind the palm so that I could drive the digger right up to the tree with the blade up against the root ball and using the bucket on the arm to slightly lift the front edge of the root ball so that when I pushed it along it stayed upright. It took me quite a while to work out how to do it.
I have now taken some more of the lower branches off. It is about to flower so I will remove those as well.
Chris wrote:I do wonder when looking at other planting pictures on various forums what happens when the palms grow, many do seem to be shoe horned into very small spaces
I've seen quite a few Phoenix Canariensis in small front gardens around central London (especially Clapham) that have survived and have massively outgrown their space. I would imagine that they will have to be removed eventually.
