Tree Trimming And Pruning In St. George, Ontario

What The Orchards Do That Gardens Do Not

An orchard prunes every winter without fail. It cuts for an open centre so light reaches the fruiting wood. And it finds out within one season whether the tree trimming and pruning was right, because the crop reports back.

A garden maple never reports back that fast. A bad cut sits there looking acceptable for fifteen years while a decay column runs quietly down inside the limb. That delay is the entire reason poor tree trimming and pruning survives in ordinary gardens and does not survive in orchards.

So the useful discipline to borrow is the cycle. Small amounts, regularly, on a schedule — rather than nothing for twenty years followed by somebody taking a third of the tree off in an afternoon.

The Collar, And Why It Is Not Negotiable

At the base of every branch there is a slightly swollen ring where it meets its parent. That collar is the only tissue capable of growing over a wound.

Take the collar off with a flush cut and the tree has nothing to close with. Leave a long stub instead and it dies back, then rots inward. Cut immediately outside the collar and it seals in a few seasons.

Orchardists learn this because a poorly healed apple is a diseased apple within two years. Everyone else learns it late or never, which is why so much of our tree trimming and pruning work here is correcting somebody else's.

Cycle Length On Heavy Ground

How often a tree wants tree trimming and pruning depends on what it is and what it is growing in, and around St. George the ground pushes that answer around more than most people expect.

Trees on the silt and clay put out heavy extension growth in a wet year and then carry it into autumn on a shallow plate. Those want looking at more often, not less.

Trees sitting on one of the gravel pockets in the moraine grow slower and drought-stress earlier, and taking too much off one of those at once sets it back badly.

Neither is a fixed interval. It is a judgement made under the tree, which is why somebody comes out before anything is quoted.

Young Trees, And The Thousand Gardens Coming

This village is the County's designated growth settlement, and a great many new gardens are going in around it over the next couple of decades. Nearly all of them will be planted with young trees on disturbed, compacted ground.

Fifteen minutes of tree trimming and pruning on a ten-year-old tree — one competing leader out, one union removed before it starts trapping bark — is the highest-value work in this trade and almost nobody buys it. The same fault at fifty is a cable or a removal.

Worth borrowing the County's own planting rule while you are choosing: no more than thirty per cent of one family, twenty per cent of one genus, ten per cent of one species, and no long runs of the same thing. A street planted with one species loses the lot at once. That is not a theory here — it is what happened to the ash.