Ideas pls: Getting from back to front without a passageway

You'd probably find local gardeners and allotments would take them for you. At my local allotment many m3 of chippings disappear within a few days.

Given that, you can possibly get up to 1' diameter, 5' lengths through to the front on a sack truck. What would you do with anything larger after taking it through to the front ?

Knowing approximately where you're talking about, does your rear boundary extend right to that road? Could you not take down a fence panel or two, and get the arborists to winch segments of the pruned/felled trees up the slope to a truck (or GBFO chipper) parked there?

I actually dug a hole for a gate post with a hand trowel.

Took a couple of hours, but it was a very tight hole indeed. I think that you will find that in the end all the time and labour saving schemes take more time and labour than just cutting stuff up into lumps small enough to fit through doors

If all the stuff could be transported from back to front the arborist would be in and out in a day, two at most, together with all timber.

Doing it myself, whilst attractive in that my labour is cheap, would require both cutting tree trunks up with a chain saw and then, having got them through to the front, disposing of them.

I will be entering my 80th year next year.

It was hard enough when I top pruned the plum and cherry trees in the front garden. The lopping was quick using an electic wood cutter (mini chainsaw). Getting it all down to fit in the boot of the car took the time.

As I now procrastinate over a solution I'm going to find the birds start nesting and it will be 10 months before an opportune time re-arises.

Don't delay: get a cat!

It's clear that the best idea is to negotiate with your neighbour. Offer him as many bottles of good malt as he can carry. :)

Failing that, you should be able to hire a labourer for say £200 a day, so you don't have to do all the carrying yourself. Get the tree feller to cut everything into small pieces and leave them in the back garden. You and the labourer carry it through your garage - however many days it takes - stacking it in the drive. Then, the tree feller can come back and put it through his chipper etc.

?? I want the birds and hence won't use cowboy tree fellers. When we first moved here there were Jays nesting in next door's trees. I hadn't seen Jays (I don't mean just the odd one) since I was a kid.

She (an old biddy, not a he) had some lads come in and chop lots of trees down one Spring. No Jays and far less blue and long-tailed t*ts since.

I'll see if she drinks gin.

Yes, seems like a sensible approach.

I assume someone has already done the (Irish) "tree fellers" joke.

To some extent, the way some of these jobs was done, was a function of what heavy equipment the company owned. As otherwise, even for very tall trees, they're felled a bit at a time, by climbing monkeys. Not many "ordinary" jobs, with clearance to pull the materials out of a yard, need a crane.

In any case, you do not cut a tree up into pieces, until you know exactly how it will be disposed of. If you cut a 12 foot branch (that would have fed into the chipper directly) into a thousand pieces 18" long, they will hate you for that. As now the pieces are dangerous to throw into the chipper, when partially ground up. Whatever the removal plan is, you have to stick with the plan until the plan has come to completion. The chipper has an advancement mechanism to pull the work into the chipper, and the people feeding it, know what size to cut. They don't put "wide" branches in that would snag on the sides of the chipper. But long long branches are fine.

Even the city tip, divides wood submissions by class. Up to four inch diameter goes in one pile. "Roots" cost 10x as much when you enter the tip, for disposal. Those might be buried on site, as they cannot go into the industrial chipper. Another requirement for our tip, is you have to wear "green patch" steel-toe work boots on site, to make a dropoff.

Paul