Talking Trees with Davey Tree

10 Mistakes Homeowners Make with Their Trees PART 1

June 03, 2021 The Davey Tree Expert Company Season 1 Episode 21
Talking Trees with Davey Tree
10 Mistakes Homeowners Make with Their Trees PART 1
Show Notes Transcript

Dash Schenck from Davey's Portland, Oregon, office shares some of his top 10 mistakes he has seen homeowners make with their trees. Be sure you don't repeat these same mistakes on your own properties! Tune back in next Thursday for the rest of Dash's list. 

In this episode we cover:

  • Tree topping (1:31)
  • Planting too deep (3:43)
  • Backfilling (6:33)
  • Wrong tree, wrong place (7:18)
  • Overplanting (9:10)
  • Improper pruning (10:02)
  • Timing (12:41)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more about why tree topping is harmful, read our blog, What is Tree Topping and Why Topping is Harmful to Trees.
To learn more about the benefits of having a tree properly pruned, read our blog, What is Pruning? The Importance, Benefits and Methods of Pruning.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
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Facebook: @DaveyTree
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YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

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Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each episode showcases one of Davey's certified arborists sharing advice with everyone about caring for your trees and landscapes. We'll talk about everything from introduced pests, seasonal tree care, deer damage, how to make your trees thrive, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. Welcome back, tree lovers. We have a special treat for you today. It's our first-ever two-part episode.

This week we're joined by Dash Schenck. He is a district manager in the Portland, Oregon area. He's going to tell us 10 of the biggest mistakes that homeowners make with their trees. Dash, was it tough to come up with 10, or was it pretty easy to come up with 10? I know from hosting the podcast, I've got four of them in my head, but then I was thinking, I wonder what's next?

Dash Schenck: The first six to seven, I thought were pretty cut and dry, but those last three, it took some brainstorming to get. I did come up with 10. Now, whether they're good, that's to be determined.

Doug: How did you want to start it? Did you want to start with your number one or your number 10? Should we do it like Letterman, top-10 list or how do you want to do it?

Dash: I don't know if I put them in any particular order. I think it's just the first ones that came to my mind, but we could just start the very first one I thought of, and I think it's probably the most obvious is topping. Customers or homeowners top trees a lot.

Doug: I was doing a virtual class the other day and somebody was asking me for information about pruning a spruce. I started to tell the standard thing. Well, you need to have a certified arborist come out and then they started telling me, yes, it was getting too tall. Let's talk about why that is such a bad thing to do because both of us actually spend a lot of our time saying never top a tree.

Dash: Just like you, I get a lot of people who say that exact same thing to me. Oh, it's just getting too tall, it's getting too big. Living in the Pacific Northwest where there's really tall fur trees, it's just hard for the course if you live up here. I have to explain to people that a tall tree isn't necessarily a dangerous tree or an unhealthy tree, especially not an unhealthy tree. Then I just have to walk them back on, why-- I first have to resolve their fears. Why are you so fearful of a tall tree? Oftentimes, they don't even know why they want to top the tree. They just think it needs to be done.

Sometimes I can back them off that ledge pretty easily. Most of the time, it's just unhealthy for the tree. It's not what the tree's intended to grow like. Certain types of trees, you're going to get response growth that is counterproductive of what you're trying to accomplish. Just educating people on the tree's health and what it's supposed to be and then how a tall tree's not necessarily a dangerous tree usually is the route that I go.

Doug: It's always going to want to reach its genetic height and width, right?

Dash: Always. It's going to grow. It's going to do what it does. I specifically tell people when we're pruning trees, let's not try to fight nature. Let's not try to make it become something that it doesn't want to be because we're going to lose in the end.

Doug: Don't try and fight mother nature. What's number two on the list.

Dash: Planting too deep. Trees are always planted too deep. I think no fault to the homeowners on this one because oftentimes, we see trees from the nursery already too deep in the pot that they come in or in the sac or in the crate. There's just too much soil on it. They get a tree right from this nursery and they put it right to grade where it is, but they don't realize that there's probably one or two inches of too much soil on it and you got to find that crown. That's a super common problem. Planting way too deep.

Doug: Well, you're right in it not being the homeowner's fault because even with my experience of spending 30 years as a gardener, it wasn't until the last couple of years when I started working with arborists that I realized that we could come from the nursery too deep. That just takes a little bit of education when you're selling somebody a tree.

Dash: I really wish the nurseries-- I don't know what they do, but it does seem like most of the trees we get from any nursery there's just too much soil, to begin with and homeowners just haven't been properly educated even how to plant it. It's a really quick and easy fix and just explaining to them that crown, and we want to see that root crown, it's like a light bulb goes off in the homeowner's mind and that's a mistake they'll never make again.

Doug: I recently planted a Dogwood as part of service at a park. I'm telling you, it was in one-gallon or two-gallon pot. I'm saying maybe six inches. We had to go down to find that root crown, root flare. If you could real quick, just explain what we want to see when we're planting a tree, how that root crown or root flare should look.

Dash: It's the transition from the trunk to the root ball. The flare is just that. If you imagine a telephone pole just comes straight down, the diameter doesn't change too much, but right when it starts to go into the roots, it starts to widen out almost like it's starting to flatten out and the fingers are starting to reach. You want to see that transition, that little bit of diameter, or start to grow. Then that's it, that's the grade that you put that right at the grade, that transition where the trunk's not covered by soil and the roots are under the ground, that's the sweet spot

Doug: What can happen when a tree is planted too deep?

Dash: Well, the most obvious thing, it's just not going to thrive. It's just not going to do as well as it could and over time, you can get the problems like simply root rot. Too much moisture on the trunk of the tree cause root problems, root rot, those things like that. What's even more frustrating is when people backfill already healthy established trees, when they backfill it and put all that soil up against the trees, because they want to make ornamental bed around or something. My sister did this and she didn't care about my opinion apparently, but I told her don't do that. She did anyways. That's really frustrating is when people backfill soil up to the trees

Doug: Don't you hate it? My son is volcano mulching. Your sister is not doing that right with that tree. That drives me crazy. We know what we're talking about.

Dash: It's so frustrating.

Doug: [laughs] All right, what's next on the list?

Dash: It has to do with planting too, but it's the wrong tree in the wrong place. In the Pacific Northwest like Portland Area and Vancouver, Washington, they love their hedges up here and people are always trying to accomplish that green screen between them and their neighbors. One of the biggest mistakes that I see all the time is people will plant Cypress trees right next to the fence, three feet apart. These trees are monster trees. They get huge and they just have a wall of Cypress trees and then, of course, 20 years later, they've grown out 15, 20 feet into their property.

They're breaking the fence up, they're over their neighbor's property and their neighbor can't stand these trees because they reach into their property and they're shading out their grass. It's just the wrong tree in the wrong spot. You see it all too often, too close to homes, big trees that are growing way too close to homes. They look good when they're small, but there need to be some forethought 20 years down the road.

Doug: Well, I know that we both feel the same way when we drive by new construction and we see something put in place and you, and I know that in five years, like you said, "Hey, this looks great right now, but in five years, all the money you spent on that plant if you don't move it now, you're probably going lose it." It's very sad for me when I drive by places like that.

Dash: That goes right into my next point is overplanting. That goes hand in hand. Landscape developers for some reason in new developments, just exactly what you're saying. It's overplanting. Not only is it the wrong tree in the wrong spot, but there's too many of them. They look good when they're small and they're five feet tall but man, the future of those trees, there's just not a lot. That's hard. You get to the properties and be like, "Yes, let's remove these because we need space for these other ones."

Doug: I think it's the instant gratification of pulling up to this new house and seeing, wow, but that wow is going to turn to wow in five years. It's going to be like ooh. What's next on your list? These are good.

Dash: Oh, thanks. The next one on my list is just improper pruning or heading cuts. So often our homeowners will have a problem with the tree because maybe it's too close to the driveway or too close to the house, and they need to cut it back. They'll just go out there with their shears or a saw or something and they just start cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting and they leave the sta-- They're just not educated enough to know where to cut and how to cut. We can usually achieve the goals they want, whether it be clearance and make nice, clean, proper cuts. That's a big one that we see is just incorrect, improper cuts and it's usually just stabbing branches out.

Doug: Do you find it easy or hard to teach someone the right way to do it? If you show them, do they usually get it?

Dash: I think it's easy to understand the concept. We always cut it back to a lateral. That is an easy concept to understand but of course, it's a lot more artistic than that when you're actually doing it. That's where the experience comes in. Because you can make the proper cuts, but it may not look that great and that's why the pros can make proper cuts, and also make it look good at the same time.

Doug: Dash, I'm so excited that you said artistic because a few episodes back I said pruning was science and art and I got corrected that it was science and a craft. I'm so excited to hear the word art.

Dash: I think it is because when you look at a tree, especially really good pruners, they look at a tree and we give them a list of to-dos. We need to accomplish these goals. Of course, it has to look good in the end, because people want their trees to look good. It's not just satisfying the needs but they want a beautiful-looking tree. It takes someone with a certain eye and a certain experience to do all those things and get a really beautiful end project. It's not easy to do. The concept is easy to learn. The proper pruning is easy to learn, but in practice making it look really, really good and natural, that's where that little artistic eye comes in. I think it's an artistic eye.

Doug: I love it. How many have we gone through now and how many more do we have to go? What's next?

Dash: We got five down.

Doug: All right, halfway there.

Dash: Five down, five more.

Doug: What's next?

Dash: That would be timing. When it comes to pruning, the timing on certain trees is really important. I guess the best example is, there are a lot of people in this area, at least who we work for the have small little orchard, maybe two or three apples, a pear. They have their little orchard cherry trees. It's really, really important to do the pruning at the right time. That's always in the dormant season, in the wintertime, right before it starts to butt out. That's always something that we tell people. We have to give some responsibility to the homeowner of knowing when their trees need to be pruned so that they can call us to get us to come out there to do it.

It's not like an automatic thing. We just don't put it on the calendar every year that we're going to come out on January 2nd and prune your trees because things change a lot in a year. People need to be aware that timing is really important. Specifically with fruit trees.

Doug: I'll give you a good example. There's this guy that hosts the Talking Trees podcast and he had this arborist from Davey come out for one tree and then after hosting and talking to one of the other arborists in the podcast said, I better have him back out for a safety check, because when I started looking up, we need a safety check," and so the arborist comes out and he looks up and they're oak trees. Out here in the east, we can't prune oaks, unless they're in dormancy. Timing should have been when he came out early in the season before everything was leafing out I should have had him take a look then too.

Now I have to wait until all the way we get into winter before we can get this work done. Dash, you're head hitting the nail on the head.

Dash: In Portland, Portland has a lot of elm trees actually. Of course, their ruse is up with the Dutch elm disease and Portland is really strict on the timing of pruning you can prune on any elm tree. I'm actually at fault with this, I had a client that we had a big storm, his elm tree got beat up pretty bad. Just because we're dealing with so much storm work, his job got pushed out and we can't prune elm trees from I think it's April 15th to September 15th. You can't touch them. It was like April 17th, when we finally were able to like, we can do this now. Then, oh, no, we, we missed it. We missed it by two days.

We have to wait. He's like, put me on the books for September 16 because the timing is really important and they take the Dutch elm disease really serious here.

Doug: In my situation where I often say on the podcast, I live in an oak forest, and so oak wilt is a serious concern for me. It's the same thing. I'm glad that Vince came out and said, "We've got to wait, we can't do it now," because I wasn't even thinking about that because it was like there's some dead branches and stuff but I'm glad I had an expert tell me not to do it now. Okay, Dash, we'll pick this up next week. I can't wait to hear what else is on your list.

Dash: Thank you, Doug. I appreciate it. It was very enjoyable.

Doug: Remember to tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company I'm your host Doug Oster. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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