Fall Tree Care

As the leaves on the trees in your yard start to turn and fall, you probably think that the time to worry about their survival has passed. While this is mostly true, there are a few things that you can do yet this year to ensure that these trees will be ready for new growth next spring.

The first and most important thing that I cannot stress enough this year is to give your tree(s) a good soaking with the water hose. This is more crucial for younger trees or those not well-established but because of the lack of moisture provided by Mother Nature this year, any and all trees will certainly benefit.

While I am on the subject, please allow me to go off on a really quick tangent. If you remember the spring of 2011, it was very wet, we experienced rain, floods, and more rain it seemed for most of the spring season. This year we saw some of the effects of that continuously wet period. There were some roots that sat in saturated soils and rotted and, as such, died off and weren’t able to provide nutrients. My point is that, usually you do not see the effects of a seasonal weather issue until the following year. So do not be surprised if your trees are not doing so well next year because of the drought conditions that we experienced this year. Again, in well-established trees this may not be an issue but in newer plantings if some of the root area was starved for water and died off, it will take some time and energy for the tree to replace the lost roots and so it may not do much as far as the canopy is concerned.

Okay now back to the fall tips. The other really important thing that a person can do is fertilize your tree. It is probably best to do this after the first frost because you do not want to encourage new/tender growth that could get damaged by a hard frost. A general purpose fertilizer is fine but if there is grass beneath the tree then most of this application gets taken up by the grass and is not available to the tree. I generally recommend the tree spikes or root feeders but prefer the spikes because then you are absolutely sure the fertilizer is going directly into the tree.

The other step I would recommend is pruning out dead and/or diseased branches in your trees. Whereas the other steps were more important for younger trees, this step is probably more critical for older trees. With that being said though, pruning out problem branches in younger trees makes for a lot less work as the trees mature.

As always, if you have any questions about the tips mentioned above, or if you want more detail about the whats and whys of the suggestions mentioned, feel free to give me a call at 433-1206 or send an email to [email protected].