Winter is coming.
It doesn’t feel like it, with several weeks of warm summer and early fall weather ahead of us. But eventually winter—and its attendant cold weather, high winds, and snow or rain—will roll around and settle into the Puget Sound area. Are your trees ready for the stress the change in weather will bring?
Here are five ways that you can begin preparing your trees for this year’s winter storms:
1. Do some pruning.
Pre-winter pruning falls into three categories: structural, hazard removal, and clearance.
Structural pruning is also part of regular tree maintenance. This strategy:
- Removes crossing or rubbing branches
- Cuts out secondary leader stems
- Removes suckers and waterspouts
- Reduces the end weight on branches by removing some of the branchlets
Hazard removal pruning seeks to reduce the hazards posed by the tree or trees in question by:
- Cutting out dead wood
- Removing flawed growth, such as weakly attached branches
- Removing broken or partially broken branches
Clearance pruning creates better access to structures, walkways, and streets by:
- Limbing up where necessary to increase clearance
- Pruning branches back from trafficked areas
- Clearing out around power lines, utility boxes, etc.
While you can certainly do some of this pruning work on your own, consider hiring a tree specialist to do it right. Certified arborists are trained to carefully assess trees for hazards, stress points, and potential problems, and they are highly experienced in proper pruning approaches and techniques.
2. Install cabling and bracing on trees that need it.
If you have older trees, or trees with particularly brittle wood, you may be able to use cabling and bracing to literally hold them together in bad weather. This is also effective for perfectly healthy trees that have bark inclusions or other weak limb attachments that pose potential hazards to the humans or structures below their branches.
In cabling, a certified arborist trained in this technique uses galvanized steel cables to support and strengthen the canopy of the tree. Cables are very secure because of their great leverage, and they can provide peace of mind to homeowners who love their trees but are concerned about their structural integrity.
Cabling can be used alone, but sometimes an arborist will combine cables with rigid rods closer to the site to the defect to provide further bracing.
Trees that have been treated through cabling and bracing require regular tree assessment in order to make sure the tree and its hardware are maintaining integrity. Pruning is also an important step in this process to reduce the overall load on the tree.
3. Catch up on your watering.
Trees, like people, get dehydrated. Unlike people, a dehydrated tree will respond by cutting off water and nutrients to its outer branches. You may have seen this, where an otherwise healthy tree sports a halo of dead branch tips, brittle, dry, and leafless. Even with Seattle’s wet, rainy winters, a long dry spell during the preceding summer can result in winter dieback.
In the months leading up to winter, maintain a regular watering schedule and provide the appropriate amounts of water to your tree or trees.
Water in the cool of the morning instead of the heat of the day.
Use a hose or a dedicated drip system to water your trees at least two times a week for an hour at a time. This long, slow-paced irrigation window will allow the water to seep deeply into the soil around the roots, while spacing watering times out by a few days allows oxygen to access the roots.
4. Fertilize this fall.
Not all trees necessarily need to be fertilized in the fall, but some may benefit from it.
Our soils here in Seattle, Kirkland, Woodinville, and the surrounding areas are generally rich in nutrients and organic matter. But occasionally some tree will struggle due to poor soil and inadequate nutrition.
Some indicators of this are:
- Little to no new growth over one or more growing seasons
- Stunted growth over one or more growing seasons
- Yellowing of leaves, or yellow new growth
The good news is that early fall is the perfect time to fertilize trees!
One great option is to apply an organic, granular fertilizer. This type of fertilizer dissolves over time as it comes in contact with water, making it essentially a delayed-release fertilizer. Make sure to use the right amount of fertilizer according to its manufacturer’s instructions—over-fertilization can be just as much of a problem as under-fertilization—and distribute it close to the drip emitter or hose that waters the tree.
Another option for tree fertilizer is deep root feeding. In this technique, an arborist uses a special mixture of liquid fertilizer and injects it around the base of the tree in a grid pattern. This makes the solution very available to the roots very quickly. Deep root fertilization is incredibly helpful for trees that are stressed by drought, disease, or under-fertilization.
5. Remove weak-wooded or damaged trees now, before storms take them down for you.
For this step, it is helpful to bring in an arborist trained in tree risk assessment to see your trees and determine if any of them have significant, hazardous weaknesses.
Trees are considered hazardous when they pose a credible threat to structures and to humans that are near them. This threat can manifest in the form of dropped branches or entirely toppled trees, and often occurs to weak or damaged trees on small urban lots during bad weather.
High winds, snow loads, and ice can all negatively impact a tree’s structural integrity. (Check out the Arbor Day Foundation’s breakdown on Storm Recovery to give you an idea of what kind of damage a storm can wreak on trees.)
Taking down a tree can be a tough decision, but if that tree is unstable enough to cause damage to your property or the property of your neighbors come the next high wind, it is the right decision. A tree risk assessment by a professional tree service can help make the process easier by identifying hazardous trees vs. non-hazardous trees, helping you make a plan for tree maintenance or tree removal, and carrying out the needed process.
Conclusion
Prepare your tree for winter storms now by following these tips, and you’ll have a lot less to worry about when the storms actually come!
If you want more help and expert advice from ISA-certified local arborists, give us a call at (425) 350-6909 to schedule your free consultation! We work in the entire Puget Sound area, including Kirkland, Woodinville, Bothell, Lynnwood, Everett, and Seattle.