We meet a lot of people who think that the only services trees need during fall and winter is damage control. And we get that. It can be windy, snowy, icy. Any of these conditions can cause damage to trees, and homeowners understandably want to get the dangerous limbs removed before they fall on a house or car. Once a tree has fallen, too, it can be a big inconvenience for navigating your driveway or sidewalk or even street.
These are all valid reasons to hire an export arborist, but the full truth is that cold weather is actually a perfect time to work on your trees actively, instead of just taking care of damage after it happens.
Benefits of Fall and Winter Tree Care
Work with Tree Structure
After the leaves have dropped, it’s easier to see the structure of trees even with an untrained eye. For trained arborists like us, then, it’s that much easier to understand what steps are needed to keep your trees safe and looking their best. With bare trees, we can more easily identify dangerous branches or sections of a tree with signs of disease and then work more quickly and efficiently, leading to savings for you down the line. Also, if you have a weaker tree on your property like an elm or poplar, cold weather pruning can rejuvenate it by removing dead and diseased wood.
Improve Appearance
The problem with spring and summer tree service is that it leaves your tree or shrub stripped bare, right when you want it to look its best. When you do the same tree care in fall or winter, though, the plant recovers and naturally reestablishes its growth pattern as spring advances, meaning that you don’t have to suffer through a summer with your trees in ugly-duckling stage.
Limit Collateral Damage
Maybe you’ve called in a tree service in summer before, only to have the heavy trucks and machinery completely tear up your lawn and landscaping. Luckily, the ground often freezes in winter. That means you don’t have to sacrifice your yard to the health of your trees. By calling us for cold weather tree service, you ensure that we can bring heavy equipment onto your property when it won’t damage the lawn and other features. This results in lower costs, faster work and better outcomes, especially in the case of large pruning jobs and tree removals.
Lessen Risk of Disease
Just like a tree is dormant in winter, so are any diseases/parasites/bugs it might be housing. That means there’s very little risk of transferring an unwanted passenger from one tree to another during a fall and winter tree service. Likewise, pruning ‘wounds’ the tree, but doing the work in cold weather before spring bud means that it will heal optimally, with less risk of infection with a destructive insect or disease.
Why Do We Still Provide Spring & Summer Services?
You may be wondering now why we keep working in warm weather, if fall and winter tree care is so important. However, there are some great reasons for warm weather pruning, so don’t hesitate to contact us for the following jobs.
- Pruning of flowering trees and shrubs: if you do this in winter, you won’t get any flowers in spring.
- Removing deadwood: sometimes this can’t be distinguished in winter, due to the whole tree being dormant.
- Opening the tree: after a tree leafs out, it may need pruning to increase air circulation or allow more sunlight into the interior
- Improving your landscaping: a tree’s canopy can end up hanging too low in summer, or a shrub can be too big once fully leafed out.
Expert Tree Service Year Round
As certified arborists, we can handle all these jobs and more, so if you’re in need of fall and winter tree care, or the same during spring and summer, don’t hesitate to reach out to us today.