Eric Countryman from Davey's East Pittsburgh office talks about all the neat tools arborists are trained to use to help your trees.
We are celebrating our one-year podcast anniversary this month with a Davey Bluetooth earbuds giveaway! To enter, head to our Facebook page @DaveyTree or our LinkedIn page @TheDaveyTreeExpertCompany to learn how to enter. This week we're sharing some of our favorite stories over the past year of how our arborists came to find their careers in arboriculture.
In this episode we cover:
To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.
To learn more about stump removal and grinding, read our blog, Is Tree Stump Removal Necessary, or is it Better to Grind a Stump?
To learn more about planting a tree where a stump was just removed, read our blog, Is it OK to Plant a Tree in the Same Spot?
To learn more about when to prune trees, read our blog, How Often to Prune Trees (Including Oak Trees).
To learn more about why pruning during the dormant season is best, read our blog, Importance of Pruning: 5 Reasons to Prune During the Winter Season.
Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
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!
Eric Countryman from Davey's East Pittsburgh office talks about all the neat tools arborists are trained to use to help your trees.
We are celebrating our one-year podcast anniversary this month with a Davey Bluetooth earbuds giveaway! To enter, head to our Facebook page @DaveyTree or our LinkedIn page @TheDaveyTreeExpertCompany to learn how to enter. This week we're sharing some of our favorite stories over the past year of how our arborists came to find their careers in arboriculture.
In this episode we cover:
To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.
To learn more about stump removal and grinding, read our blog, Is Tree Stump Removal Necessary, or is it Better to Grind a Stump?
To learn more about planting a tree where a stump was just removed, read our blog, Is it OK to Plant a Tree in the Same Spot?
To learn more about when to prune trees, read our blog, How Often to Prune Trees (Including Oak Trees).
To learn more about why pruning during the dormant season is best, read our blog, Importance of Pruning: 5 Reasons to Prune During the Winter Season.
Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
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 Companies podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more, because here at the Talking Trees Podcast, we know trees are the answer.
This week, we continue celebrating our one-year anniversary of the podcast. Hooray. As a thank you, we're holding a Davey Bluetooth earbuds giveaway through the end of the month while supplies last. To learn more about entering the giveaway, read this episode's podcast show notes below, or head over to Davey's Facebook or LinkedIn page to learn more. To find us, just search Davey Tree on Facebook or LinkedIn to see our podcast giveaway post for instructions.
I'm very excited this week to be joined by Eric Countryman. He is a district manager for the East Pittsburgh office of the Davey Tree Expert Company. Eric, you are our very first guest almost one year ago exactly. Thank you for returning. This is exciting for me. I've been wanting to do this episode for quite a while, talking about all the cool tools that I've heard about over this year from talking to arborists, things I never even knew existed. Welcome to the show.
Eric Countryman: Thanks a lot. It's good to be back.
Doug: The first tool I want to talk about is one I've heard about, I don't know what it's called, but is it some type of drill bit where you drill into a tree to tell if it's solid or rotten. Does that sound right?
Eric: Yes, there's a tool called a Resistograph. It is a drill, and there is a contraption that goes on top of the drill from where the bit is over top of it that will give you a printout like a seismograph-looking kind of thing, as the drill bit is drilled slowly into your trunk of your tree. Typically, they're 20-some, 30-some inches long. The drill bits are very small, so the hole they make is very, very insignificant.
As it goes into the tree and it hits resistance, you see the line go high on the piece of paper, and then when you go deeper in, if the tree is hollow or you're hitting mushy center, that line falls. By the time you're done and you bring the bit all the way back out, you've got a printout of inch by inch what that drill bit has encountered as it's gone into the tree. You can more or less see, and in that window of where that drill bit is, what kind of resistance is meeting and what the solidness of the wood is. You don't want to just do it in one spot.
Typically, when I use it, I incorporate a compass so that I'm really hitting four pretty even corners around the tree and try to get at different heights from your base higher than above your root flare. When you're using it on the trunk of a tree, you want to try to use it at various compass points, four or five around, and then go up about a foot each time, so you get a much better spiral picture of the inside of your tree. You can use it on more than just the trunk. If you have a hollow spot higher up that you're worried about, if you can get the machine up there, you can use it anywhere in the tree.
Doug: When you're looking at a tree, when does that tool come out? When are you thinking like, "Okay, we better--" I'm guessing there's lots of different reasons you use a tool like that.
Eric: Yes, there would be lots of different reasons. A lot of it is if you do suspect it's hollow, if you're seeing weeping, if you're seeing signs of growth. Usually, the first tool before that is a sounding hammer. We have a special hammer with a plastic end and a rubber side, and we do use that pounding on the trunk of a tree like a drum just to see if we can hear for hollowness before we start poking around with a machine that can be a little-- it works great, but it can be a little temperamental. Mainly, you're using that kind of thing to show if the structural integrity of a tree or a branch is in trouble because it's starting to rot or it because it has gotten completely hollow.
Doug: Tell me what an air spader is. That has come up before in the podcast, but I don't know what it is.
Eric: An air spade, or sometimes it's called an air knife, is a handheld tool, basically, looks like a long tube. You have a handle at the one end, like a trigger handle, and you have a nozzle at the other end. This thing hooks up via air hose to a large air compressor, like the big toe behind ones you see. It blasts high-pressure air out of that nozzle, and you use it to remove soil, grass, from around the base of a tree or a root system, so that you can see what's under the ground without damaging those roots by trying to remove all that soil.
Doug: How often does that thing get used? Do you have all this stuff with you when you're going to see a property, or do you say, "I better bring my air spader today, or my Resistograph"
Eric: Yes, no, I mean, a lot of times you have to make a trip, come back around. Some of those tools can be pretty expensive. You're talking a couple of thousand dollars for some of them. You don't tow a big air compressor around with you everywhere. A lot of times what happens is us arborists will go out to a property, we'll notice, say, that maple trees looking a little peaked. It's not thriving. We examine it closer. We see like maybe there's some girdling roots or possible girdling roots, or maybe it's volcano mulched.
That's when we say, "Okay, we need to come back with that air spade and expose that root system to see what we're--" Again, experience kind of tells you what you think you're going to find and what you know what you're going to have to do when the time comes. Generally, you're making a special trip around. Those tools we don't carry in the back of the car all day long.
Doug: That makes sense. How about the hammer? [laughs]
Eric: That I have in my car all the time.
[laughter]
Doug: I don't know which side to use on a hammer, so that's how good I am with them. That's why, Eric, I need you to be coming to look at my trees. It's a good point because a normal person, a regular homeowner, they're not going to be able to use any of these tools. That's why you need an expert to come out. What else is in your arsenal when you're thinking about me picking your brain about tools that you use?
Eric: The two other tools I carry in my car, well, two or three really, a core soil probe, about two feet long. Just so you can see, is the soil really sandy? Is it soaking wet? Is it muddy or is it dry? If you can't get it an inch in the ground, that soil's probably so dry, it's probably time to water. It can tell you a lot even if you can't use it because it's so dry, it's telling you a story.
Then I also always carrying a hand shovel, a little hand trowel, or a little gardening rake, because, again, to remove stuff from around the base of a tree, it'll help pull back. A lot of times people get grass too close, and it'll just help to clear it away so I can see what I'm doing.
Then the other one is, all of us arborists carry special tape measures called DBH tapes, which mean diameter at breast height, which is basically how you size a tree. A lot of treatment protocols, if there has to be some pesticides applied, a lot of it is based on that diameter number. It's incredibly important. It's like knowing the weight of a person before you give a medicine, you usually need to know the DBH of a tree, too.
Doug: Well, the other tool I was thinking about is bigger, a chipper. Again, in my opinion, no homeowner should be running a chipper. That sounds really dangerous to me. A trained expert should be running a chipper.
Eric: Yes, I think wood chippers, you should definitely be trained in how to use it. We bring a new employee on, they are watching the videos from the manufacturer. They're having special training by the experienced foreman before they're ever really allowed to start chuck and brush through a machine that big and that dangerous. A lot of the little ones, like say you can rent from Home Depot as a homeowner, are even more dangerous, because they don't have as much the safety protocol, and they almost work so quickly that something can go wrong very, very fast.
Doug: Well, people don't realize if they do start to do a little bit of pruning, how much material you can accumulate very quickly?
Eric: Very, very quickly. Part of a plan of gardening, of tree work, of everything is debris disposal. Unless you live on some giant farm where you can just push it in the back forty or burn it, most homeowners, that's just not an option. You're going to fill up more than a couple of paper bags to put out in the local garbage. We run into this a lot of times with customers where they want to save a little bit of money, and they're thinking, "Oh, you know what? Just leave it. I'll take care of it. Just bring down the tree. I'll clean it up."
The vast majority of the customers I run into would have absolutely no way of doing that. They just have no idea how much volume they're going to generate. Sometimes, it's unsafe for us to just start piling up huge piles of debris to work in. That it's actually the chipper helps keep a clean and safe workspace as well.
Doug: Well, Eric, being a cheapskate, I have done that too, and luckily my arborist from Davey talked me out of it like, you're not saving that much, and you're going to be working for weeks, months, years --
Eric: To get rid. It's always, well, my brother-in-law, he burns wood. I'm like, "Well, you better hope he's really going to come and get it because we've had to come back and make second trips for a lot of absentee brother-in-laws."
Doug: Another tool that I talk a lot about when people are asking me like, "Hey, can I plant a tree here after one's taken out is a stump grinder." Tell me a little bit about what that tool does. I mean, a stump grinder, but how does that work?
Eric: There are many different kinds, but on a professional level, basically it's a large machine that either is self-propelled, so the size of a rather large tractor, or it's towed behind a truck of some kind. It is just a large spinning wheel with hydraulics, it keeps that wheel spinning. All it is doing is chewing into that really hard stump wood and throwing it out behind it usually, or to the side of it the debris that it's chipping up.
A lot of them can go about 8 to 10 inches down into the ground, not much further than that. People that want to ground all the way to China, that's just the machine only goes so deep. That's why I don't recommend, if you want to plant a tree, unless it's a really tiny one, you don't want to put it right on top of an old stump because no grinder is going to get it all the way to soil. Even if you did, that spot's going to settle for 10 years. You need to put the tree five feet the other direction at least and get it out of the way.
Doug: I get peoples emailing me and they want to drill into the stump. They want to put something in the stump, they want to start to stump on fire. They've got all sorts of crazy ideas. Just get a guy that knows what he is doing, an expert, and get it ground out of there. That's a great point. Again, not only is that spot a bad spot to plant another tree on, but for the reasons you said, but there could be pH issues there, too. If you're taking out a pine tree or something, that could just be so a acidic.
Eric: Well, and it's going to decay, so you're going to have literally rotting wood, and you don't really want to put a healthy tree right on top of that.
Doug: Good place to grow mushrooms.
Eric: Exactly. Then when you're talking about people with drilling and they want to salt it or they want to do it, all they're trying to do at that point is speed up the natural decomposing process. If you really just want to leave it, then just leave it. There's no reason to do all that other stuff. All you're going to do is either hurt yourself or salt the earth, and none of those things are necessary.
Doug: Tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing this time of the year. On the east here, it's cold, the ground's frozen. What kind of work do you guys do in these situations?
Eric: We're doing a lot of pruning and a lot of removals, specifically oak pruning and elm pruning.
Doug: Oh, makes sense.
Eric: Then actually we've lately been leaving beach trees also to the winter because of the rise of beach canker we've seen in the city of Pittsburgh. Just trying not to expose wounds during the scale insect seasons and all of that. It's just to be safe, the research I've read doesn't necessarily say it's not recommending that's a must, but why not if it can wait, wound wait.
Doug: We've talked about this before on the podcast, but if you wouldn't mind remind us why it's important to prune those oaks and elms during the dormant season?
Eric: Well, oak trees are susceptible to a vascular disease called oak wilt and Dutch elm disease attacks American elms. For the same reason, we try not to prune them when they're actively growing. It attracts the insects that are the carriers or the vectors for those fungal diseases, and so just out of safety, we do them now. That way we don't really have to paint all the wounds. It can naturally heal and close, and there's really then no risk for the disease spread if you give them time to close up.
That season typically starts April-ish, and I've heard differing reports, but on the safe side, we typically don't get back into pruning oaks or elms until sometime mid-October. If an emergency and you have to because of a storm, then we would paint the wound, but then you're doing say you're trying to take all kinds of sprouts and epicormic growth out of an oak tree, the time it would take to paint all that would just be silly. It's just easier to wait till the winter.
Doug: Well, I want you to talk a little bit about that painting because to explain to people that is in the case of like you say, a storm or something like that, normally, you're not treating a cut with anything. Is that right? Unless there's some kind of issue like this?
Eric: Correct. I'm a believer, and I think the research shows it as well is that letting a tree naturally if you make a proper pruning cut at the branch collar where it can naturally heal itself over, it's going to compartmentalize that, it's going to be able to grow new bark and growth around it. Whereas if you paint it, you're just sealing in whatever you could be sealing in disease on itself or rot or you're not allowing the plant to breathe. Just not my recommendation and like we said, you're not attracting insects to these open wounds, then otherwise, yes, it's not a great idea.
Doug: Are there any other big tools that you use that a homeowner wouldn't have access to when you're doing work?
Eric: Yes, the different operations get into different things, but we go all the way from needing to bring in multi-ton cranes to small ride on little loader machines. Sometimes they're called dingoes or whatever, that have a grapple or a bucket to help with all that heavy lifting to get the wood out of the backyard and into the back of a truck. We have all of that heavy equipment, which again, we go through training and extra training to make sure our operators are all safe and know what they're doing.
Then the other thing is frankly, the sheer size of chainsaw that a professional arborist uses is generally a lot larger than what a homeowner's going to have at their house. If you want to cut into a larger piece of wood, doing it with a tiny saw is not really good for the saw, it's not good for you, and it's just unsafe.
Doug: I want to finish off talking safety, chainsaw safety, climbing safety. This is what you guys are trained for. I tell people, do not go up on a ladder to try and take care of your tree issues because you've got somebody who again spends a lot of time learning to do this the right way. I know you and I both have seen neighbors, friends, especially since we're in this industry, they'll send you a message and say, "Well, I'm going to." I'm like, "Don't do it." Don't do it. It's not worth it. Just if we could finish off with a little bit safety for homeowners.
Eric: The type of equipment and the type of tools that we use as professionals are designed to do the work efficiently and safely. A homeowner just doesn't have access to that too. When you're talking about a climber, to outfit one single climber with gear, with saw, then this is not training. Again, this is just for them to do the job, you're talking multiple thousands of dollars worth of gear.
A homeowner just doesn't have that. Every single piece of that gear is useful for a safety aspect or an efficiency aspect. Just a ladder and a chainsaw is so exceedingly dangerous. It's just not worth it. It's that, well, what's the worst that could happen? Well, you could cut a limb off of yourself, and you trying to save a few bucks here or there by not hiring a professional could lead to lifetime issues. We're not talking hangnails. This could be serious injury or death.
Doug: Well, that's great advice, Eric. I appreciate it. We always do want to push that message of safety. Thanks so much for your time. One year, we'll definitely talk before another year, right?
Eric: Anytime, Doug. Anytime.
Doug: All right, Eric, thanks so much for your time.
Eric: You're welcome.
Doug: Good stuff as always from Eric. Now, next week we're talking about favorite big trees for the landscape. I think you're going to be quite surprised at what's being recommended. Don't forget, you can win some Davey Bluetooth earbuds just by heading over to the Davey Tree, Facebook, or LinkedIn pages, or just read the show notes below to find out how to get a pair of those earbuds.
Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees Podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster. Do me a favor, subscribe to the podcast. We're having fun. I know, I am. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees Podcast, trees are the answer.
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