As a homeowner we certianly recognize the benefits of having shade trees in our yard,
yet one of the challenges we all have as those trees grow
is the fact that you can't really work underneath the tree,
you might have trouble growing grass.
I'm just gonna step right over here and I'm of average height and you can see what happens.
How would I mow this yard, how would you mow it on a mower.
It's very difficult. What we're going to do today
is to limb up this tree in such a way that
you don't destroy any natural feature of the tree,
yet you provide the the clearance necessary for you walking behind your mower, for
riding on the mower
for pedestrians walking down the sidewalk if this might happen to be a street tree.
When you begin to limb up your tree
you look for branches that are duplicating, either growing horizontally next to one another
or vertically on top of one another
or those branches that are
emanating from within the canopy up high and
swoop down and cause a problem like some of these branches here
and this is where I'm going to start.
As we prune
one of the other features that happens is as you take weight off a branch
the branch itself, the rest of the branch may raise up out of the way and not be a problem
so by taking out the lower
branches first, the bottom branches first, you find out how much more of the branches you
really do have to remove.
This is a branch that's emanating from the trunk up here. This is a good solid branch right here,
but this lower limb right here just should come clear off
where it comes out of that major limb.
And then again you can see this opens up
a great deal of space very, very quickly.
We have other branches that have been on the tree for some time and have already been perhaps
limbed up or pruned back in the past.
There's a branch here that's about an inch and a quarter in diameter. If you follow it
out you can see that in the past it's now dead back quite a ways.
but this has been pruned off in the past for head clearance, for line clearance. By now this
whole branch is no longer productive for the tree
and we're going to remove the entire branch right back to the trunk with the pruning saw.
One of the first things you do
is take off the weight of that branch. You don't want to have to fight the weight of the
branch as you cut through it.
So I'm just gonna indiscriminately here about 18 inches or so from the trunk of
the tree cut that extra weight off.
We don't have to worry about bark splitting at this point, because it's so far away from the
trunk of the tree.
We'll finish that off.
There you go.
The final cut needs three cuts.
You need to do an undercutting to keep any bark from splitting.
Then you come in front of that
so that as you cut and this branch falls down
this cut right there stops any bark from peeling down the trunk.
So that's the weight of that branch off.
Now I'm going to make the final cut.
The other important part when you make the final cut is there's the shoulder area right here.
Think of this as our tonsils.
This is what helps the tree
not allow decay into the trunk of the tree, so you want to cut on the outside of
that shoulder.
So you will actually be leaving a little bit of a bump.
So that's the finished cut and we've taken off a larger limb.
We haven't had anything split down
and that's the bit of wound that's left.
The tree will heal over this very nicely.
Well, we finished pruning and as you can see this is a dramatic difference by just taking off
those limbs that have been hanging down,
by taking off competing limbs that have been growing side by side or on top of one another
and properly pruning the larger branches to the trunk of the tree.
This pruning will now hold this tree good for probably two maybe three years before it has
to be redone