Preventative Maintenance

 There are a few trees up around the pool deck and one of them, while not planted in our yard, hangs over the pool deck. It happens to be a oak tree and I knew that when it started to drop leaves, the pool would be a mess to deal with.

I was getting ready to go on a trip so I needed to be proactive on keeping things to a minimum that could go wrong while I was gone. I had no idea if it would get cold enough while we were gone to drop all those leaves but I knew I wouldn't be here to take them out of the skimmer basket and I didn't want to spend the entire trip worrying.

I got out the long tree pruner we have and headed for the deck. I was able to cut back all but one (that was out of my reach) of the branches that was hanging over the deck.

I have to say I was very happy that I wore safety glasses because that tree dropped so much down on me, my contacts would have been a mess. I was able to fill up two trashcans of branches and leaves off that oak.

You can't really see in this photo how much I took off that oak but it was substantial. I was afraid that there would be a hole left in the tree but in the end it didn't really show too much.