Haven Blog

How to Save Money on Your Tree Work

John Becker — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:29:26 GMT

For homeowners in the northeast, tree care can be an expensive cost that's hard to budget for.

How much will it cost to remove that tree? Prune that other one? Remove the big dead branch from the one over there?

How can you even start to budget? Unless you've gone through it before, you're flying blind.

But there are factors that can drive your final price up or down, and the more you know going into it, the better off you'll be.

The team here at Haven has been doing tree work since 2002, so we've seen the good and the bad.

And while every job is different — so the answer is alway "it depends" — there are some things to keep in mind so you're prepared for what's to come.

How Much Does Tree Service Cost?

So, yeah. The answer is always "it depends". But that's true about anything, isn't it? The key here is to know what it actually depends on.

How Your Arborist Thinks About Cost

When an arborist comes to your house to look at your trees, he's thinking in terms of hours. Everything in his head is calculated by how long each part of the whole job will take.

Trim that maple? 30 mintues.

Take down that cherry? 1.5-2 hours.

Cable that oak? 60 minutes.

On top of that, he's factoring other time costs. How far is this property from my home base? Am I close to other jobs so I can justify the trip? How far are the trees from where I can park my chipper?

Why is Tree Care So Expensive?

Well, this one's pretty obvious, but let's take a crack at it.

First off, tree care is expensive because it is dangerous. Arborists climb trees or use lifts that take them high into the air, where any fall could be deadly. For the ground crew, there are falling branches that twist as they descend.

Teams use chainsaws, wood chippers, and hydraulic winches. On top of that, you've got power lines and pesticides.

So, lots of ways to get injured or killed.

That makes insurance pretty pricey.

The equipment is expensive, too. Trucks, chippers, stump grinders. These things aren't cheap either. And a good tree care outfit will have dependable equipment that's safe to operate.

So, How Do You Keep Tree Service Costs Down?

All this being said, there are some things that can keep these costs down — some within your control and some not.

The Things You CAN'T Control

Everything you can't control comes down to location, but you should still be informed so you know what to expect.

It'll cost less if...

You're close to the dump
You're close to other tree jobs they're doing
They can get their gear right up to the trees
Your septic system is easy to work around
Your trees are far from power lines, your house, your neighbor's man cave, etc.

If not, it will cost more.

The Things You CAN Control

Tree workers don't just cut trees down. They also haul everything away. All that hauling costs money.

Want your job to cost less? Make them haul less.

Can you keep the wood for firewood? That will be a huge savings. And for those of you with a woodstove, you're turning backyard waste into real BTUs.

Need woodchips for your garden or somewhere else? That means they don't need to drive them to the dump.

Can they blow the woodchips right into the forest? That means they don't have to haul them at all.

A Final Reminder: Don't wait for Emergencies

One last one: If you're desperate for help, expect to pay more. Did a storm blow down your sycamore? Is that dead oak branch hanging by a thread over your garage?

Many tree problems can be avoided with regular maintenance and pruning. Don't wait for catastrophe before you pick up your phone.

Take Care of Your Trees and They'll Take Care of You

Go ahead and try to picture a beautiful park without trees. I bet you can't. Trees enrich our property so much that fancy city neighborhoods are referred to as "leafy".

Your trees enhance your property. Caring for them is expensive because it's dangerous and techincal. But there are ways you can save money if you plan ahead.

Not sure what a particular service will cost? You can get an estimate by sending in some photos and describing what you want done.

Or, you can reach out to Haven directly if you're in the lower Connecticut River Valley.

Nine-Tenths Broken

John Becker — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:02:29 GMT

Step One:

The wooden bow began with a challenge I took to heart and an image that stuck with me. I was visiting Neill – a good friend who lives on a quiet lake in southern Connecticut. Neill made bows, though not for a living, in the strictest sense. Neill hunts deer by primitive means; a wooden bow and arrows with stone points, all made by hand. As I looked at his handiwork, Neill said that I should make a bow. “It’s easy,” he said. He handed me The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible (Volume Two) by Jim Hamm. I asked about volume one. “No, volume one is garbage. This one will give you all you need.”

Step Two:

I was living with my mother at the time, home after college and working as a logger. I had fallen out of favor with most of my hobbies and decided that making a wooden bow would fill that hollow feeling I used to get when I destroyed more than I created. Most of the The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible went over my head. One image stuck, though: “A drawn bow is a stick nine-tenths broken.” I liked that. This project would be one of precision – not my usual strong suit. Then, in addition, another quote stood as a challenge to much of conventional wisdom. I came across it in the final chapter in which Hamm describes killing his first deer with primitive weapons: “I finally decide the inner compulsion boils down to the challenge involved. There are few wild frontiers left to conquer today, and the only way to face new frontiers, to face new challenges, is through self-imposed limitations. Each of us chooses the degree of challenge through the degree of limitation: compound [bow] instead of rifle, recurve instead of compound, hand-made wood bow instead of fiberglass. As Professor Comstock said, ‘wooden bows return us to a time when bows were bows and men were men.’”

Step Three:

I began with an ash log five inches in diameter and nearly six feet tall. I had cut it months before to make into a couple of baseball bats. The wood was sound, dry and unchecked. I split the log into two staves with a maul and wedge. The better of the two would become my bow.

I came across an out-of-print Eric Sloane book called An Encyclopedia of Early American Tools. In elegant etchings and sparse, adulatory prose, Sloane describes the tools American colonists used for the tasks of daily life. Of specific interest to me was a drawknife – a two-handled tool with an eight-inch blade pulled toward the user to take shavings off wood. According to Sloane drawknives were used primarily by coopers and carpenters, but were now all but forgotten.

My grandfather, dead many years, had known tools well. My father, dead too, would have dug it out for me and helped me sharpen the blade, but the vast collection of old tools in the basement were foreign and painful to look through for my widowed mother and so I had to do the searching. In the piles of rusting tools left by my grandfather I found an old drawknife – its steel now the color of wallet leather.

Step Four:

In principle the making of a wooden bow is simple: make the back of the bow one continual growth ring of wood. With white ash this is particularly easy. In The Natural History of Trees, Donald Culross Peattie writes, “Every American boy knows a great deal about white ash wood. He knows the color of its yellowish white sapwood and the pale brown grain of the annual growth layers in it. He knows the weight of white ash not in terms of pounds per cubic feet but by the more immediate and unforgettable sensation of having lifted and swung a piece of it, of standard size….For it is of white ash, and of white ash only, that good baseball bats are made.” As a lacrosse-playing child during the age of metal bats, I found myself in slight disagreement with Mr. Peattie but I approached my bow with patriotic sentimentality for lost knowledge.

An old adage of the bowyer, says Jim Hamm, is to “take a piece of wood and cut away everything that doesn’t look like a bow.” I decided to lump this into the category of pseudo-helpful maxims told to people making their first bow that don’t really help them at all – already a deep list. The fact is, though, making a bow is heuristic. One must learn by doing. As children we watch people drive cars all the time, yet all that casual study doesn’t teach us half of what we learn in the first five minutes behind the wheel in a parking lot when we are sixteen. Same with bows. I read the book. I was as prepared as words could make me. The rest I had to learn by doing.

White ash is known for its wide growth rings and paucity for what woodworkers call “early” or “spring” wood – the weak and porous section that separates one growth ring from another. With drawknife in hand and patience in mind, I began scraping the bark to find the single growth ring that would be the back of the bow. The journey began with ashen flakes of dry bark sputtering off the drawknife blade to fall in a clumsily circle around my workbench. Next the fibrous inner bark – cinnamon colored – could be peeled off by hand. After an hour of sweaty work, the back of the bow lay uncovered, sweetly smooth and arced like the curve of a jar.

Step Five:

Now the belly. Tapering the two arms gave me an eye-opening lesson in the difficulties of symmetry. I soon conceded that my bow would not be perfect. This admission was vastly empowering. By giving myself the permission to screw up I attached less emotional weight to the final product, and focused more on the process. I filed out a handle, then began thinning the arms. When the bow was still more than an inch thick I could bend it slightly over my shoulders. A round file – called a pipe file – cut notches into each end.

Step Six:

I could not stop thinking about Jim Hamm’s words: “the only way to face new challenges is through self-imposed limitations.” A friend of mine who was a nationally-ranked skier recently made the switch to telemark skiing – downhill skiing with bindings that allowed his heel to move freely, almost like a cross-country skier’s. This new method did not allow my friend to go as fast down the mountain or to perform the same level of tricks. He could also no longer compete in big-name tournaments. I asked him why he made the switch to this more difficult version of his pastime. “I wanted to make the mountain steep again.”

The tillering process began once the bow could be bent slightly. A loose string was attached to both ends and the bow was drawn, slowly, so that the bowyer could check the curve of each limb. Stiff spots were sanded down. At each tillering the bow was easier to draw and the limbs bent farther.

Step Seven:

I knew the bow as well as I’ve ever known anything. I spent dozens of hours looking closely at the shape, the curve, the growth rings. Even now I could pick any chunk of white ash out of a pile of other wood and compare it to my first bow. (My bow had a dry fifth year, but grew quickly after that.) Ash shavings, even ash sawdust stand out.

To string the bow: The bowstring should already be measured perfectly: It is linen, home-spun, and will rest taut, four inches from the handle when strung. One bow point braced against the ground: Check. Lean into the bow, simultaneously bending the upper arm. Slip the second loop of the bow string over the upper notch I lean against my braced bow – a leap of faith – with Hamm’s words in my ear: “a drawn bow is a stick nine-tenths broken.” Pulling, gathering string, loop over my thumb, my God it’s going to break, pulling harder, another two inches, I’m sure this thing will break, farther, sweat on forehead, knee braced against handle, pulling, closer, almost, knee hurting, pulling, bow bending sharply, farther than ever, pulling, almost, closer, there. I slip the loop of string over the upper notch, release, and stand like Ulysses. I am reminded of setting a rabbit trap, cocking a rifle, standing atop a hill on my bike – the overwhelming feeling of holding the power to release stored energy.

Step Eight:

I returned the book to Neill and we went out shooting in the field near his house. Jim Hamm says that a working bow is the highest purpose for a piece of wood. Without adding metal or glue or nails, wood can be made into a viable and effective tool, which perhaps has had as much importance in human history as anything else. Archaeologists show that bows have been used for 50,000 years and appeared on every continent. In the Connecticut pasture, my first target was not lion, Mongolian, or Saxon, but a half-deflated yellow kickball fifteen yards out. I drew my bow slowly, the smooth shaft of the arrow tickling my left hand. Pulled the linen string to the corner of my mouth, sighted along the arrow shaft, breathed out slowly. The arrow flew, whispered through the fall air, pierced the ball, and the yellow kickball skittered away, arrow flopping over and over, rolling in the afternoon dust as if it were on the plains of Africa.

Lessons from The Italian Olive Harvest

John Becker — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:56:14 GMT

“Anche le olive verde?” I ask, the words awkward in my American mouth. The answer comes in the easy cadence of Tuscan Italian: yes, we also pick the green olives. This much I understand, the rest I need to look up later. But for now I turn my attention back to the small hard green olives that seem unique to the tree before us. It is a fiercely bright morning in early November—the first day of the harvest on this organic olive farm in the twisting hills of eastern Tuscany.

Olive harvesting (at least the version of it in which I participate) appears to have changed very little in the last several thousand years. We stretch great nets under the trees to catch the falling olives. Climbing up single-pointed ladders, we stand wide-legged on the boughs. The fruit grows on the ends of long vertical scions, which we bend, praising their suppleness, to bring the olives near. We slide our hands and fingers along the branch, popping off olives, which fall with a satisfying patter on the nets below.

I had previously known olives to be one of two colors, jet black or drab green, but those that hang on the trees have complex and vibrant hues. A few are black, but most are a rich sweet purple, some are granny smith green, and some are the color of raw coffee beans. At times, I even forget what I’m picking for the olives look so different than I expected. They could be cherries or grapes, but they are olives, and they are beautiful. The boughs sway in the breeze, and the leaves shimmer green and silver. Regardless of color, all olives go to the press. The green ones, known for their strong flavor, offer less oil. The black olives give the most oil but tend to be mild. Even these, though, are as bitter as acorns when first picked.

The hills across the valley echo with the sound of men and hounds. They are hunting the wild boar, cinghiale. The hounds bay eagerly, close to their prize. Men shout commands to the dogs and call to each other. The sounds reach a cacophonous crescendo and are abruptly ended by gunshots. Six. Soon there is cheering.

The ground beneath the olive trees grows thick with grass and wild herbs. As we step and carry basketfuls of olives the air is heavy with the smell of bruised mint and thyme. I am awed once more by the simplicity of the Tuscan diet. From these hills, one cloudless day in November, we have the makings of a feast: Cinghiale con olio e menta. In America, food travels an average of 1,300 miles from farm to table. Here in Italy I can hear the gunshots as the olives land softly in the net.