Eric’s Tree Care Tips

How to Handle Freeze Damage on Trees

ross@workingclassmarketing.com (Ross Giltinan) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 05:52:25 GMT

How to Handle Freeze Damage on Trees

This was an incredibly cold week in Texas with temperatures dropping to historic lows. Especially here in the Houston area, temperatures stayed below freezing for extended periods of time reaching as low as 9° F depending on the area of town you’re from. With how sudden and unprecedented this winter storm was, many homeowners were unable to prepare their trees adequately for the weather and are now having to deal with freeze damage on their trees and plants.

Recovery for Citrus & Palms after Freeze

Over the next few months, many citrus trees (including lemon, lime, grapefruit, and orange trees) and a whole host of palm trees will require special attention and care to ensure survival and recovery. Deep freezing weather can change the physiological properties of surviving palms, plants, and citrus trees so plant owners must act quickly. Actions taken during this vital recovery period immediately following a hard freeze will make the biggest difference for the affected palms, plants, and citrus trees and their chances of survival.

Give your trees the best fighting chance against freeze damage with the help of your Board Certified Master Arborist (BCMA). With years of arboriculture experience and tree care expertise, Eric Putnam BCMA will work with you to ensure every step is taken to enhance the survivability of your valuable palms, plants, and citrus trees. Tree recovery takes time but we’ll help make sure it goes right.

Tips for Dealing with Freeze Damage to Trees

Here are a few very valuable and important steps you can take to ensure the survival of your trees after a hard freeze.

For citrus trees:

DO NOT TRIM or have anybody trim your citrus trees. Trimming your citrus tree at this point can further enhance the physiological injuries.
Your citrus may lose all of its leaves, and that will be okay.
DO keep plenty of water throughout the summer.
DO NOT FERTILIZE your citrus during the recovery period. It can cause unnecessary growth that will put the tree into further stress.
DO use biostimulants as they do not fertilize your tree, but will feed the microbes that bring your citrus trees back to health.

For palm trees:

DO NOT ALLOW ANYBODY to PRUNE YOUR PALMS without first confirming they have proper equipment sterilization protocol in place. They MUST be able to exhibit this in front of you. There are some important and deadly palm diseases that are readily spread throughout our community due to contaminated equipment and material.
DO NOT ALLOW ANYBODY to DEBOOT your palms. Debooting causes extreme water loss and will speed up the decline or death of your palm after this weather event.
CUT ONLY THE DEAD PALM FRONDS even if it means that you keep pruning the palm. If you cut green fronds, you will stress and starve the palm possibly killing it.
DO NOT FERTILIZE your palms during the recovery period. This will cause a spike in unnecessary and harmful growth to your palms.
DO use biostimulants as they do not fertilize your tree, but will feed the microbes that bring your palms back to health.

Why Soil pH is Out of Your Hands

ross@workingclassmarketing.com (Ross Giltinan) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 05:41:29 GMT

Why Soil pH is Out of Your Hands

An introduction to soil pH

Soil pH in a landscaping setting is often misunderstood by landscapers, gardeners, arborists, and novices alike. This could be due to the limited availability of science-based landscaping information. Most relevant information comes in as recycled science from the farming industry where more money is available for scientific research. The lack of money invested in the study of landscape science forces a connection between the farming and landscaping industries. And much like the situation in Cinderella with all those people trying to fit her show…it’s not gonna work!

The most important piece of information that often gets lost in translation is that established plants produce and adjust their own pH levels regardless of parent soil pH. Because farmers grow different crops on the same fields and these are annuals, soil pH actually matters. This is because the crops won’t be in the soil long enough to effect change before they are switched out for new crops requiring a different pH level. If any one of these crops stayed for an extended period of time, they would need to adjust their own pH levels. In short, plants do not need soil pH adjusted for optimum growth. Measured readings of pH levels are not necessarily accurate to what the plant creates for itself. This can mislead the gardener, landscaper, or arborist thinking that the pH is off when in fact, according to the plant, the pH is perfect.

Is soil pH an exact science?

Soil science relating to pH levels is typically an exact science except for where it pertains to plants in an established landscape setting. This includes gardens and established wooded areas. While measuring soil pH is one thing, being able to change pH levels on a more or less permanent basis to an established planting of any kind without causing physiological damage to the plant is another. In any case, the soil buffering capacity will prevent any long-lasting change to pH levels, but your plant will forever be changed by the treatment.

The problem occurs when science tries to group soil technology, farming, and landscaping into one box. Nearly everything science has to offer a gardener, landscaper, or arborist comes from studies done to the farming industry even though these two are only slightly related. The biggest difference is that farmers rarely deal with established plants. Farmers will measure the field pH levels to determine what is needed for their crops to be grown and the soil pH is successfully adjusted. It is impossible to change the pH of the soil where the existing plant has influence over the pH levels without causing physiological damages to the plant.

Where is soil pH most important?

The soil-root interface is where the pH is the most important; however, this is also where it is hardest to measure. The average gardener cannot measure pH at the soil-root interface. The pH changes with the order magnitude as you move away from the soil-root interface, so the soil you measure for pH does not in fact represent the pH at the soil-root interface. This means that the pH readings you get will be largely inaccurate, thus leading you to false conclusions about the condition of your plant.

The interface between the soil and the root.

At the soil-root interface, the proton pumps exude and absorb hydrogen. This area is very sensitive to disruptions and disorders. Some of these disruptions can include artificially changing the pH levels in the soil, soil compaction, herbicide injury, alcohol poisoning from anaerobic conditions caused by standing water, and more.

Links Used

https://www.cannagardening.com/introduction_ph

https://phys.org/news/2013-04-blueprint-cheap-hydrogen-production.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1389556710000390

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-electrolysis

https://www.besgroups.com/electrolytic-hydrogen-generator/

https://newatlas.com/energy/artificial-leaf-hydrogen-fuel/

https://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/acids_bases_coloring.html

https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/b74-133?journalCode=cjb1

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC438054/

https://organismalbio.biosci.gatech.edu/nutrition-transport-and-homeostasis/acquisition-of-nutrients-in-plants/

https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/37053/what-is-difference-between-h%e2%81%ba-and-proton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_acidificationhttps://www.agric.wa.gov.au/soil-acidity/soil-ph?page=0%2C1

http://herbicidesymptoms.ipm.ucanr.edu/HerbicideDamage/

The Dangers of Using Recycle Yard Mulch

ross@workingclassmarketing.com (Ross Giltinan) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 05:30:50 GMT

The Dangers of Using Recycle Yard Mulch

It’s common practice for local tree service providers and landscaping companies to take their green waste to nearby recycling or mulching yards. Recycling yards typically charge a fraction of the cost of landfills making them the preferred choice for disposal. These tree companies get to save money while also recycling their debris and other green waste. In a perfect world where everybody did their job to the best of their abilities, this would be an ideal situation both economically and environmentally. Unfortunately, mulching and composting aren’t that simple.

The Keys to Composting

To create nutrient-rich compost, the process is time-consuming and requires special techniques, skill, and knowledge. It’s much more complicated than simply mulching some tree branches and letting them sit for a few months. Occasionally turned or static piles of mulches can take years to produce a healthy compost. And even under ideal conditions, the soonest a quality compost could be produced is about six weeks.

The most important and critical needs for composting are:

Water
Oxygen
Heat
Constant Turning

If any one of these requirements is neglected, then the compost will be compromised. The key to composting is finding the perfect balance and amount for each requirement. Too little or too much of any of these needs will result in lower quality compost. As in many “theory vs. practice” situations, the reality of composting is that it is extremely difficult to meet all the requirements necessary to produce good quality compost. This is most often where issues in the process occur, especially with recycle yards handling the mulching.

Why Recycle Yard Mulch is Dangerous

Imagine this scenario: you have a dead palm tree in your yard and you hire a local tree service company to remove the palm tree. While you may or may not know what killed the palm, you hire an arborist and they tell you the palm died due to Fusarium wilt, a common fungal disease that has no effective treatment. The infection was brought to your palm by dirty pruning tools and dirty mulch, and unfortunately, the company that you hired to remove the palm for you is the very same company that brought the disease that killed it in the first place.

The hypothetical tree service company in this common scenario wants to save money, so they take the dead and infected palm to a recycling yard for mulching instead of to a landfill, the proper place for green waste disposal. This tree service company also did not sterilize their tools after removing the dead palm tree for you. Once at the recycling yard, the infected palm tree is mulched up and mixed in with existing mulch piles. Not good!

Tree Diseases Can Spread Through Contaminated Mulch

At this point, infectious Fusarium wilt of palm fungi has now been mixed in with all of the mulch. That means yards of contaminated mulch will be spread all over the community. The fungi is further spread to any plants and trees worked on by the tree company’s contaminated tools.

Now if the mulching operation and recycle yard were careful and effective, these pathogens would be destroyed to prevent cross contamination. Unfortunately, very few mulching yards properly compost the mulch for diseases. The reason for this? It’s impossible! If you fully composted the mulch, it wouldn’t be mulch anymore and instead would be compost. These types of recycling and mulching yard companies are in the business of producing quick and easy mulch–not compost. Therefore, their business model doesn’t require the complicated and lengthy process that would kill all the pathogens before your infected palm makes its way into someone’s beautiful garden as mulch.

Links Used

https://bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.0032-0862.2004.01059.x

https://www.livescience.com/63559-composting.html

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/PP/PP10000.pdf

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pp278

Testing Palm Trees for Lethal Bronzing

ross@workingclassmarketing.com (Ross Giltinan) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 05:22:56 GMT

Testing Palm Trees for Lethal Bronzing

Lethal Bronzing Disease (LBD), also known as Texas Phoenix Palm Decline (TPPD), affects the Phoenix species of palm trees.

Join Eric Putnam BCMA as he teaches you the do’s and don’ts of testing palm trees for lethal bronzing.

Although in this specific case our palm tree testing came back negative for Lethal Bronzing, something is causing the trees to die. Eric Putnam BCMA can help diagnose not only the palm tree but its environment and the surrounding conditions to diagnose your Texas palm tree and decide the best treatment for your tree’s health.

Introduction: Meet the Master Arborist

ross@workingclassmarketing.com (Ross Giltinan) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 05:12:08 GMT

Introduction: Meet the Master Arborist

Eric Putnam is an ISA Board Certified Master Arborist ®. As a second generation tree guy, he was practically born in the industry and now has over 30 years of professional experience in arboriculture and tree care. Nicknamed “The Tree Whisperer”, Eric shares his knowledge of trees and tree health care with his customers to help their trees grow and thrive for years to come. He’s joined by AJ from Hippie Fertilizing, a fellow industry professional with common interests in soil biology, tree health, and how we impact our environment.

This is the first of more good content to come! Please let us know what you think. Being a Board Certified Master Arborist, Eric Putnam’s goal is to help educate as many as he can on tree care health and myths out there.

Check out the video below to get to know more about the Master Arborist: