Storm season is coming—are you and your trees prepared?
Seattle, along with many of its neighboring cities and towns, has been hit hard by winter storms in recent years. While you know that these storms are inconvenient at best and outright dangerous at worst, have you taken the time to think about how they might affect your trees?
Let’s talk about what you can do to make sure that you and your trees are prepared for this year’s bad weather.
Take a Tree Inventory
Take a few minutes to walk around your property and look at your trees.
How many trees do you have?
Do any of them have special sentimental value?
Do any of them look like they are cracked, leaning, or otherwise unstable?
Are any of your trees in a position where they might damage something important if they lost branches or fell?
If you know that the storms of last winter did affect some or all of your trees, how are they doing now?
Assess Your Trees for Hazards
Doing an inventory of trees on your own is a good start, but it isn’t enough. Even a tree that looks healthy to the untrained eye could pose a big problem in a winter storm—high winds, ice, and snow can all break branches off a tree if not topple it over altogether. Diseases and weak growth patterns that might have weakened a tree are often hard for a layperson to detect.
Instead of leaving it up in the air, bring in a local arborist to conduct a tree risk assessment.
Tree risk assessment is a special qualification within the realm of tree maintenance. An arborist with this qualification will be trained to carefully evaluate:
- The location of your tree or trees
- Their proximity to structures or power lines that may be dangerous in a storm
- Their structural integrity
- Their likelihood of failure in high winds or heavy snow load
- The amount of deadwood on a tree
- Any root disturbance—lifted or damaged roots that would fail to anchor a tree in high winds
Late summer and early fall is an excellent time to talk to a certified arborist about what damage last year’s storms might have done to your trees, as well as potential future damage they might incur or even be the cause of.
A good arborist will be able to help you figure out just what you need to do for your trees.
If you get a professional opinion after doing your own tree inventory, you’ll have the peace of mind that comes from knowing exactly what is a problem, but not urgent; what is a problem that needs to be dealt with soon; and what isn’t problematic at all.
Address Any Immediate Problems
Take advantage of the time you have before winter hits to address immediate problems that your arborist brings to your attention. When it comes to trees, especially trees on tight urban lots in Seattle, Bothell, or elsewhere in the metropolis, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Treat any diseases, fungus, or pests that have affected your tree. Not everything can be treated in the fall, but do what you can now.
Remove excessive deadwood. This is one of the most common problems that we see here at Elite Tree care. Like the name implies, deadwood is material that is no longer living, but is still weakly attached to the tree. This kind of wood is easy to break off by hand, let alone in a strong storm. So removing deadwood is a smart pre-winter step.
Do structural pruning. This type of tree trimming will take out crossing or rubbing branches, lighten branches that are too heavy, and remove growth that is flawed or weakly attached to the tree. A trained arborist will also prune to create better clearance around power lines and walkways.
Provide enough water. Give your trees an extra boost of hydration at the end of a hot summer. A dehydrated tree will start dying back at the tips of its branches and sometimes throughout entire limbs as it conserves what water it has. This just creates more fire deadwood for you to have to deal with down the road. Make sure that your tree gets watered at least once a week (or more in the hottest weather) for an hour at a time, so that the water seeps deeply into the soil.
Fertilize. Give your trees some extra fertilizer as you go into fall. Focus on trees that you notice have stunted growth or lots of yellowing leaves. Fertilizing in fall will provide the trees with some bonus nutrition at the end of season to store in its root system and trunk, while also making sure that nutrients are available to the tree next spring as soon as it wakes up.
So much for the short-term items. Is there more you should be doing for your trees past prep for this winter?
Make a Long-Term Plan
Like many other areas in life (and homeownership), it’s good to have a plan going forward.
This is another way that a good arborist who is local to your area can really help you. After conducting a through tree assessment and addressing the most immediate issues in tree health and hazards, your arborist can also recommend a maintenance schedule for your trees as well as needed procedures, such as:
Regular pruning. This is an important part of tree maintenance! Pruning supports tree health, structural integrity, and aesthetics. It’s one of the best things you can do for your trees.
Deep root fertilization. This specialized treatment is the injection of balanced liquid fertilizer into the earth surrounding a stressed tree’s root system—almost like giving a human an IV. This can go a long way towards helping a tree overcome stress that otherwise might kill it.
Tree removal — unfortunately, not every tree can or should be saved. Extremely hazardous trees can cause costly damage to houses, cars, power lines, and even sometimes endanger human life.
Emergency Tree Removal
Even if you do everything right, there may still be instances this winter where one of your trees falls or is extremely damaged in a weather event. Elite Tree Care has a 24-hour hotline for tree emergencies. If you need us, we’ll be there to investigate the tree and take quick action to mitigate the existing damage and prevent any more from occurring.
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.