4 Tree Pruning Mistakes You Should Avoid

Often, people simply hire a person down the street with a chainsaw to take care of their trees. Who does not like to save money, anyway? The problem is, cheap tree pruning services could ruin trees' appearance and usually leave them vulnerable to diseases, storm damage, and even death. The following are common tree pruning mistakes to avoid: TOPPING Topping is the most obvious and ugliest of tree pruning mistakes people make. It involves chopping off a huge portion of the top of tree's crown, or all of the braches with leaves across the tree's top half. What's left after this process is a deformed, ugly structure with extremely weakened branches. BAD TIMING There are good and bad times to prune trees. The timing depends on the condition and species of a tree. For example, oak trees in certain places shouldn't be trimmed from the month of February through June. This is because during this period, they're vulnerable to oak wilt disease. If a tree's already experiencing stress, it shouldn't be pruned heavily. Always have your tree checked by a professional arborist before allowing anyone touches it, unless it's alright with you to absolutely lose your tree. Also, pruning away branches that face West is not a good idea in summer time. When you get rid of big branches that provides shade to your tree, you could cause sun scald on maples, red oaks, and other vulnerable species. Sun scald leads to damages and wounds to the bark of the trunk, which can cause severe damage to a tree. INCORRECT CUTS Cutting branches off too close to the main trunk of the tree is a very common pruning mistake. If you do so, you are removing the branch collar which is an area of tissue with cells that assist in healing the wounds of trees. It is recognized as a small bump or swelling where the branch connects with the main trunk. The callous which the cells of the branch collar makes will hamper disease from entering the main trunk. If you cut that branch too close to the main trunk, you are making an open wound that could let pests and diseases in, putting the tree towards an early death. Bark tears can occur when the proper steps are not taken when removing large branches. If you make the wrong cut in the wrong order, you can end up with a large branch falling and tearing or splitting your main trunk. OVER PRUNING You should prune off not greater than 15 to 20 per cent of the foliage of a mature tree at a time. In fact, 5 to 10 per cent is often enough. When you trim off too much, you will leave your tree incapable of producing sufficient amount of food for itself, support its structure, and transfer nutrients. People usually over prune to let the grass beneath their trees to properly grow (which occurs rarely). If you have several trees in a certain area where you'd rather grow grass, it's better to rather remove some trees to allow more sunlight in, and do structural trimming on your remaining trees so you could have both healthy grass and trees.

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