tree diseases and the symptoms to watch for
Looking To Prune Your Tree? Avoid These Mistakes
Wesley Perry
When your trees are pruned properly, it shows. It accentuates your home and landscaping and makes people take notice. Pruning takes a lot of skill and artistic ability. You have to be able to recognize the issues that need to be pruned and make the plant look as if no one touched it. Oftentimes, mistakes are made that make the tree look absolutely horrible. Avoid making all of the tree pruning mistakes below.
Cutting the tips of your branches on a regular basis.
Many people assume that cutting back the tips by a few inches isn't going to harm the tree. In fact, you are doing more harm than you realize. Pruning is meant to help your plants grow. If you take the tip from a branch, it causes 4-6 new tips to sprout up in its place. Snipping that one tip takes away the dominant bud that prevents other tips from growing in. You have now created more of a mess than before by trimming where you shouldn't have.
You keep cutting the longest branches on your conifers back.
Sure, no one wants to have their conifers growing out of control, but that doesn't mean you should just lop them off. If you only remove part of the branch, you leave the rest of the branch sticking out with a sharp point on the end. If you don't prune this particular tree the right way, it won't be able to recover. New growth stems from the buds that formed in the previous season. Since they are on the ends of the branches, you are stunting the growth when you lop the branches off.
You chop a tree off to make it stop growing taller.
Oftentimes, people end up injured from trying to chop their tree down to a size they like. If you take the top of the tree off, you are essentially allowing the tree to create even more limbs that are going to grow bigger and fluffier than before to make up for the one you took down.
Remove any weak, misdirected or competing branches. This helps to promote healthy growth. You want to enhance the natural shape and form of the tree. Healthy shaping starts on the inside of the tree, not at the tips. When all else fails, you can turn to a professional to shape your trees and make sure they are being pruned the right way.
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Do you love the trees on your property? Are some of the trees looking as if they are not as healthy as they once were? Do the smaller trees get enough sun to grow tall? Sometimes, trees can develop diseases or become infested with insects that can cause them to die. If you catch these diseases and infestations early, you can oftentimes save the tree, or the surrounding trees. To learn what to look for on your trees, visit my website. There, you will find a long list of diseases and the symptoms to watch for to protect your trees from destruction.