What is Tree Care?
Trees are living organisms and can get a weakened immune system similarly as an animal or plant would. Watering and mulching are easy first steps to ensuring your tree stays healthy. We have a few more tips to help your tree thrive
Watering
With our hot, dry summers, and tendency for drought conditions, proper watering is the best thing tree owners can do to help their trees.
Mulching
The importance of mulching is often overlooked, especially when trees are planted in an area covered with turf grass, but mulch is an easy way to manage soil moisture, temperature, and contribute nutrients to less-than-ideal soils.
Fertilization and Soil Amendments
Fertilization can be a touchy subject; most readily-available fertilizers are not designed to improve soil and feed trees in the long term. Some products, like “weed and feed” treatments, can actually harm trees. For sustainable, long-term improvement, a balanced mix of organic and inorganic fertilizers and soil additives yield the best results.
Trimming
- Timing
- Depending on your goals for trimming, it may be better to trim during different times of the year.
- Maintenance Trimming
- Maintenance trimming is what most healthy trees need to maintain their health and balanced growth and is generally recommended every two years for mature trees.
- Specialized Trimming
- Structural pruning is generally performed on young trees, structural pruning helps to establish balanced, healthy growth.
- Restoration pruning is generally performed when a tree has been topped, or has sustained other physical damage, restoration pruning can be used to guide it back to a natural shape.
- Retrenchment pruning is generally performed on older trees that have less vigor and ability to sustain new growth and can often benefit from directed trimming that reduces overall size and weight while maintaining health.
Tree Health Care
At all stages of life, trees can suffer from stress, damage, pests, and diseases. “Tree health care” refers to the use of organic and inorganic chemical application to address a health issue or bolster a tree’s ability to cope with a stressor. Plant health care needs are determined by a certified arborist and treatments are performed by specialized technicians.
Common types of plant health care include:
- Fertilization
- Soil Amendment
- Pesticide Application
- Disease Management
- Chemical Growth Regulation
Additional Resources
The International Society of Arboriculture has a guide on tree trimming and plant health care.
At Texas Tree Surgeons, we love trees and we love our community! We hope this blog on tree care will encourage you to annually schedule an arborist assessment to maintain tree health. We have additional resources on our North Texas Tree Owner’s Guide. If you would like immediate assistance with your trees please contact us today.
This is the contact info for the person actually sending in the form and sample. Make sure to indicate that you are the “Homeowner” or other category at the bottom.
For most tree owners, this will be the same as the Submitter Information. It is extremely important to make sure that the address under this section is where the tree or plant is actually located. An accurate location is essential for disesase tracking.
We recommend receiving results via email, as this is the quickest method. If there is a third party, such as your arborist, to whom you would like the results sent, indicate that here.
This can be one of the most daunting parts of filling out the form. You may not know all the information about your sample. It is important to fill in as much as you do know, so that proper recommendations can be made by the TPDDL.
If you are submitting a sample on your own, you may not have a specific disease in mind, and just want to know what’s wrong with your tree. However, you may have information from an arobirst or other plant health care professional who recommended sample submission. If you are not sure what to select, leave everything blank, and the TPDDL will perform a basic test. If they determine that further testing is required, they will conduct those as well. If you have been instructed by your arborist to get a test for a specific disease, indicate that here.
The TPDDL is supported by state of Texas funds, but does charge a fee for its services. The stardard diagnosis charge (as of December 2018) is $35 per specimen (individual plant/tree). Additional tests carry additional charges (see above). Make sure to include payment for the basic diagnosis and any opther services selected. If further testing is needed, the TPDDL will send a bill for any additional charges. If you do not wish to have any further testing done beyond the basic diagnosis, indicate that in the Comments or on the back of the form. However, an accurate diagnosis and management recommendations may not be possible without more specific tests.
This is the lab-assigned number for each specimen submitted. This number should be used in any correspondence to the TPDDL about your submission.
Here, the TPDDL will confirm the submitter information and provide any general notes about the sample.
long with the dates the sample was received and processed, this section will indicate the TPDDL employeee responsible for your testing (diagnostician) as well as what types of tests were perfomed.
This is the most important section of the lab report. Here, the diagnostician will list one or multiple diagnoses for the problems observed on the samples submitted. This information should be passed on to your arborist.