How to Winterize Your Landscape & Garden

Eric Countryman from Davey's East Pittsburgh office discusses best practices for winterizing your landscape to help ensure it will thrive in spring and summer.

In this episode we cover:  

• How have drought conditions impacted trees on the East Coast? (:52) (1:38)
• How to winterize maple trees (2:34) (4:11)
• What material does Eric use to winterize trees? (4:54) 
• How to prepare evergreens for the winter (5:48) (6:42)
• How to water trees and plants during the winter (8:34)
• Winter tree prep tips (9:11)
• What should you do with your perennial gardens during the winter? (10:20)
• Can you plant trees during the winter? (13:05)
• Top planting mistakes people make (14:58) (16:37)
• Is it too late to fertilize your trees? (17:19)

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

To learn more winter landscape prep tips, read our blogs, Tree Care Checklist: How to Keep Trees Healthy This Winter and 5 Smart Steps for a Winter-Ready Landscape.

Check out a past Talking Trees episode about winter landscape prep here, Why It's Important to Prepare Your Trees and Gardens for Winter and Should You be Watering in the Winter?

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 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

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

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's 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. Well, he was the first guest ever on the Talking Trees podcast. I'm welcoming to the show Eric Countryman. He's the district manager for the East Pittsburgh office of the Davey Tree Expert Company, right down the road from where I'm at. Today, we're talking all about winterizing our garden and our landscape. Eric, how are you? Welcome back to the show.

Eric Countryman: I'm doing well, Doug. Thanks for having me back.

Doug: I wanted to start, actually, with the drought conditions that we've had in our area. Most of the East Coast has been either drought or severe drought. What have you seen as far as the trees are concerned?

Eric: Drought brings a lot of problems in all parts of a tree. You will see a lot of root dieback because there's not a lot of soft soil for the roots to live in, and the tree starts to retreat. You see a lot of early fall color or lack of any vibrant fall color. I don't think it's been a terrible season, particularly here in Pittsburgh, but definitely not as big as it usually is or can be.

Doug: It's the worst I've had since 1988, Eric.

Eric: I'm almost—yes, I am that old.

Doug: With fall rain and snow, we should bounce back. The trees will be okay, you think?

Eric: I think they will be. I know in the last few years here in Pittsburgh, the one thing we've suffered from are these mild winters, which I know anyone that drives on the roads is happy for. Less snow, less misery. The problem is the not-freezing temperatures leaves our trees sitting in just cold mud, and that has really caused a lot of disease problems. You don't know it until the spring and the summer hits, and these roots are just dying of these fungal diseases because they've been sitting in this wet, cold mud for months and months and months. What we need is really good, solid freezing for one year or more, but definitely we're due and we need one.

Doug: Yes, I agree. We've had such mild winters. We're due for one, so we'll probably get it. Let's talk a little bit about winterizing the landscape and let's start with trees. Maybe specifically maples. I've talked on the podcast before about how maples react in the winter. What should we be doing with our maple trees?

Eric: I think the biggest thing to be concerned about are younger maple trees or really any tree that has a soft, barked appearance, so your maples, sycamores, lindens, especially when they're young. Even really any young tree, but maples seem to be the most problematic with this. These trunks are very soft-wooded. If you've got a nice, sunny winter day, the sun shines on that trunk. They get a little warm. Maybe the sap gets a little bubbly, a little warm underneath, and then temperature drops at night like it always does, and they freeze, and it expands.

What that causes is that cracking, splitting bark on the tree. You'll drive down a row of maple trees in, say, a housing development, and you'll see a crack on every single side of the tree. That's not because someone came around and hit it with an ax. That's because that's the sun's side, and then the night came and cracked them all. Unfortunately, it's a problem that the tree can sometimes not recover from, and it'll create a rotting split right up to the middle of a trunk, and it's called sun scalding. It is, again, a non-recoverable problem, and it's very typical in new and young trees.

Doug: What do we do, Eric? I don't want to lose my new maple tree.

Eric: The best thing to do is to cover that trunk for the winter. You can wrap it in sort of like a burlap or a cloth, but like a plastic sheathing around it. Some plastic drain pipes, maybe not my favorite. I've also seen people use pool noodles if they have one of those around. I just drove in front of somebody's house here in my neighborhood, and they had used multicolor pool noodles on all their new trees in their front yard, and they had 10 of them. It was quite colorful.

Doug: Yes, it sounds beautiful, really.

Eric: It was a choice, but it was an idea.

Doug: When you would go to a property, what kind of material do you guys have to do this job?

Eric: Yes, typically you use a black plastic or a plastic wrap to put around it, just to cover it so that the sun's not really able to get directly to the trunk of the tree.

Doug: How long does that stay on?

Eric: Really, once the frost ends and the cold weather ends, you'd want to take it off immediately.

Doug: You better take it off, right?

Eric: You better take it off, yes. Really what you're looking for is those warmer sunny days and then those really cold nights. Once you get into the nights that are in the 30s, 20s or high 20s, 30s, you'll be fine. It's the nights that are dropping into the 20s and the teens. That's when you really have the problems.

Doug: How about evergreens? Is there anything special we should do with our evergreens before winter hits?

Eric: Evergreens suffer from the same problem with the sun to the cold, but it's more that they burn on the outside. You see the burn on the ends and the tips of the plants. You can tell it's a sun problem if it's, again, more on the sun south and west sides of the plant. That's typically where you'll see it in our hemisphere, or you could have windburn. Which is, again, when the trees are a little bit active because of the day, and then a cold wind snaps through and just burns them. It's freezing that the moisture that's moving in the tree is able to wake up because of the warmer weather.

Doug: Is that something to cover or is it up watering or what are we doing?

Eric: You can physically cover them if they're sizable that you can. Burlap is a nice material. There's two ways to do it. You can basically wrap them up like a package, tie it on top so it really is sealed and covered. That's not really obviously practical for bigger plants. The other thing you can do is you put a stake like in three different sides, like a triangle around the plant to act like a tent and then wrap your burlap around that.

That's good for your shrubs like hollies and boxwoods and evergreens really are susceptible. Then there's a more, I would say, chemical solution of using anti-desiccants, which is you can spray on these evergreen trees. It stops them from drying out and so it keeps some of that wind burn problem to a minimum.

Doug: Is that something I would spray on like something like a rhododendron or an azalea that's evergreen? Is that a plant that would be good for that?

Eric: It would be, yes. Rhododendrons, evergreens, hollies, boxwoods. If you have a beautiful boxwood hedge, especially one that's susceptible to a lot of wind in the winter, the anti-desiccants help. The other thing is in our climate here in Pittsburgh, a lot of people like to plant southern magnolias. It's a risky game because we can get a bad winter and they can get really burnt up. The other thing I've seen planted around here too are some like cryptomeria. Those, again, we're a little bit too north for those. The anti-desiccants can help them stay protected through the winter.

Doug: We've talked about drought. What about watering those plants, especially newly planted trees, before we get into freezing temperatures or a freeze on the ground?

Eric: I think a big mistake people make is when the leaves fall off, they stop watering. That's a terrible plan. You should keep watering the trees just like you were in the fall, once or twice a week, 20-some gallons or 30 or whatever you need for the size of plant you have, until we're getting a good frost and not just a little bit of ice on the grass, a really good frost.

Doug: What else can we do for our trees before we get into winter? What else should we be doing?

Eric: I would say root protection is a good thing to do as well. A lot of times we talk about mulching in the spring, cut down on the weeds and hold moisture to the ground, but maybe we swept all that away or it wore out or it doesn't look as good. Making sure you have a good layer of mulch or a good layer of compost in mulch is not a bad thing. Adding some nutrients and organic matter to that soil around your tree, it's a good time. Give it the winter to break down and then you'll have a nice bed and a nice tree ring when the spring comes.

Doug: Boy, we talk a lot about mulching so I'm just going to say it and you correct me if I'm wrong. That mulch should never touch the bottom of the tree, it should look like a donut and not a volcano. Did I get it right?

Eric: That's right, exactly.

Doug: All right, let's get into the flower beds. We know we need to take those annuals out. Those can't stay in the garden. Let's get them out, get them into the compost pile. Once frost hits them, they turn to mush, and there could be diseases. Let's go with the perennial garden. There's lots of different ways that people deal with their perennial garden at the end of the season. Some experts say, leave it up. It's good for the birds. It's good for the pollinators, beneficial insects. On the other hand, it could drive you nuts if it just doesn't look right for your garden. I think it's a personal preference. What do you think?

Eric: I'd say that there are benefits and drawbacks to both sides. I think the perennial gardens should be left up to as long as you can, and let all that green come out of the plant because that's pushing energy back into the roots and back into the soil, so it'll be there and ready to pop back up in the spring. If you come through too early, before they really have gone to dormancy, you could take a lot of energy out of the plant to use come the springtime.

There could be some good reasons to leave it up, too. Plants could have beneficial seeds that birds can eat over the winter. There could be some beneficial insects that are overwintering in that debris and in that plant material but then you have the mess come the spring to clean up. I know my family, they were on the internet and read that it was good for the pollinators and good for the birds to leave all their flowers and plants and everything up all winter long. They did that. They have a big garden full of a lot of flowers and a lot of plants.

Then it was a wet, miserable, cold, rainy spring. It was so muddy, they could never get out there and do anything. Then everything greened up and grew, and they had a huge jungle to maintain and try to clean out. They just said, never again are we going to wait till the spring to clean up our beds. It was too much of a mess.

Doug: The funny thing is, in my garden, Eric, all those years they told us to clean it up, I just left it there because I'm lazy. I was doing something positive just because I didn't want to get out there and work. As we said, it's personal preference. If you do have one of those springs, it does make it difficult.

Eric: Maybe a bit of laziness isn't a bad thing. There is benefit to getting the, especially the perennial growth, the flowers [unintelligible 00:12:50] that you've come up. Getting that cut back and chopped off, but maybe those late season leaves that have come down, you just pack them around your perennials a little bit to help bed them in, to give them a little protection. Particularly if we do get a really bitter cold winter, it can help protect those root systems.

Doug: Talking about getting the garden ready for winter, can we still plant trees this time of the year?

Eric: Yes, absolutely. It can be a great time to plant trees. Some trees plant better in the spring and some trees plant better in the fall and into the early winter. I think that flowering trees, our dogwoods, cherries, red buds, they do really well going in the fall. The reason is when you're getting them, especially if they're bald and burlap and they're fresh from a nursery, they're cutting them out of the ground in the spring right when they're trying to leaf and flower and then hauling them over to you in a pretty fragile place. Then you're hauling them to the planting site and then they're going in and then the summer hits. If we have a drought like we've had this year, they never get a real chance to develop.

The benefit of the fall is they've been in the fields all summer and they're ready to go. They're on their way downhill. They're not trying to support flowers. They're cut, bald, burlap, delivered to you. You put them in, they get comfortable in their new environment and then come spring, they explode and they're ready to go. This time of the year when we're planning on cleaning out the garden, it's a good time to look at where can we add a new tree and what would be a good tree to add in the fall or maybe the ones you want are better for the spring. Clear that area and get it ready.

Doug: What do you like to plant in the spring? What do you think does really well when planted in the spring?

Eric: Evergreens plant well in the spring because they're green all around year. You put them in, they get pretty acclimated and then they can flush some growth. I think that your bigger trees or harder wood trees can handle it. Again, you don't want to rush it before they've really put on their leaves and opened up.

Doug: Give me one or two or three things, biggest mistakes people make when they plant.

Eric: Planting too deep.

Doug: Is that number one?

Eric: That's number one. That's number one with a star because it is the one that it may survive but you're going to call an arborist out to look at it because in three years it'll never grown or it'll look anemic and sad. You'll go, what can I do? It's like, well, it's too late now. There's not a lot we can do when it's buried, 3, 4 inches too deep in the ground.

Doug: We talk about this all the time, but explain root flare and where that should be when you're planting and how important that is.

Eric: The root flare is where the trunk meets the roots. There's a bit of a curve from the trunk down into the root system. You should be able to see that above the soil level. That should be at, or even just a tiny bit above the level surface of where you are planting the tree. Sometimes you get a product from the nursery and it's piled 3, 4 inches high up the trunk because that is a lot of times how it's grown in a nursery. Good nurseries knock that extra soil off before they burlap it. Not everybody does, but it's easy to fix.

You just pull that burlap back when you're trying to plant, make sure you've knocked all that extra soil off so you see that root flare and then that's your guide. You just want to make sure that hole that you're digging is not so deep that when you backfill you're putting that soil right back up to that trunk. Because once you do, those roots are never going to be able to really spread out.

Doug: Any other important mistakes people make?

Eric: I think the second mistake is they don't make the planting hole wide enough. It's easy to make it exactly the size of the plant you're putting in. You go up with the heights, great. Left to right is good. You drop it in. Oh, a little bit of soil around the sides. We're all good. The problem is now you've got a scored by the shovel, smooth hole that you've put this plant in. If you have clay soil, basically what you've built is a pot, a clay pot to put it in. Then those roots can't get out. You need to expand your planting hole so that soil is loose. Those roots have room to move into some soft, fresh soil.

Doug: What about fertilization? Is it too late to do that?

Eric: It's not too late to fertilize, but you want to use the right kind of fertilizer. You want to use a slow release nitrogen fertilizer. That way it's not going to overstimulate growth when the trees are in there going into dormant season. If you put a high nitrogen, you could really somehow, short circuit it into thinking it's time to grow. Then that growth is going to get absolutely burnt off in the winter.

Doug: What about the nasty insects that are trying to find a way into our trees before it gets too cold?

Eric: We do have insects that overwinter on our trees, just as our trees are going dormant for the winter so are the insect populations. Either they're laying eggs or they're just finding a place to hide. It is a good time of the year after things have gone dormant and things are very dormant, it's a good time to apply some horticulture oil to help prevent and contain those overwintering insects so that come the spring, there's not a big flush of them.

Horticulture oil is sprayed on the branches and the structures of the trees and shrubs where a lot of those insects are located. It smothers them so that they can't breathe and it kills them so that we don't have such a big population going through the winter, ready to come out in the spring.

Doug: This is something we do right now?

Eric: It is something we do right now. It can be done now or at the very end of winter before spring hits, so you got a good window. The biggest thing you want to make sure is that it's not too early because it can burn and on certain evergreens, particularly ones with color, it can because some discoloration if it's not applied correctly. It is important that it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing and it's done at the right time or you could because some burning and some damage.

Doug: All right, Eric, good stuff. Getting us ready for winter, I appreciate it. What is your prediction? Easy winter or tough winter?

Eric: I would like a cold, dry winter.

Doug: All right, you got it. We'll make sure that it happens. Thanks, Eric. Great to talk to you again and I'm sure we'll talk to you soon.

Eric: Thanks, Doug.

Doug: It's always great to catch up with Eric, that's for sure. Now, tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster, and do me a big favor, subscribe to the podcast so that you'll never miss a show. Have an idea for an episode? Maybe a comment? There's a couple different ways to reach us. Send us an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S at D-A-V-E-Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas might be on a future podcast and we would love to hear from you. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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