Don't be a Hack | How to prune a tree | arborist tips & tricks

all right welcome to strider tree gear uh today we're going to talk about a little bit of pruning all right so if you're getting ready to do some pruning there's a couple of tools that are really useful so this is a professional arborist pruning saw it's made by silky silky makes fantastic saws you should clean off the blade with some bleach so you're not transmitting bacterial vectors trees can catch a cold similar to humans bacteria can cause problems and you don't want to pass it from tree to tree so a nice sharp pruning saw is great also pass-through pruners there's little hand ones where the blades actually pass through each other so it doesn't just come to a stop it actually pushes through like if you look at this here this blade doesn't stop where it meets that it passes all the way through it's called a pass-through pruner they tend to make cleaner cuts and leave less tear out you want some good pass-through pruners whether it's by hand or the loppers or this one which is actually on a pole which is great for grabbing tips from way up in the tree so those are your primary pruning tools if you need to cut something big and fast you can use a chainsaw but you want to make sure that you make your first cut away from the branch collar so that in case it peels out a little bit you won't have a big scar down the side of your tree so you make your first cut out a little ways from the branch collar and then you flush it with the chainsaw afterward and that'll uh that'll get you a long way when it comes time to go pruning so let's go check out the tree over here that we're gonna do some work on all right so today we're out on the job i'm doing some pruning on these live oaks that are going to be kind of the centerpiece of the landscape on this new construction here in auburn so here we have a live oak and the kind of pruning i'm doing today is mostly aesthetic fruiting these you could pretty much just let them grow how they're going to be and they will generally be all right there's a few things that you want to gain shoot for when you're pruning most any tree dead and dying limbs limbs that are crossed and rubbing and in this case i'm going to prune also for aesthetics which is going to mean a little bit of an interior cleanout so there's a little bit more airflow a lot of trees can benefit from that because it helps prevent some some of the moisture uh moisture caused vectors like funguses or molds so it can reduce that to some degree and it also looks really good when the inside's a little bit more cleaned out so we've got this fairly small young live oak and i'm going to demonstrate a few of the prime pruning cuts and we're going to do a little bit of an interior cleanout i would generally work to get a more even structure around the outside of the canopy but in this case this one's really nice so it doesn't need much of any of that the what i'm aiming for when i'm going to prune the structure of the trees i want the canopy i want all the outside of the canopy to have nice sun exposure if i've got branches that are real tight to the inside and low i either got to cut them off or i have to reduce the branches above them so that those low ones are now in the sun in this case we've got this nice round canopy so i don't really have to mess with much i am going to cut a few of these underside branches and i'll demonstrate that right now so as i'm looking at this tree some of the things that stand out to me is this density on the inside so i'm going to take my little silky and i'm going to go through and i'm going to cut out quite a few of these little guys not all of them because i don't want to lion's tail it and if you don't know what lion's tailing is you should look it up online because there's some great pictures of it but i'm going to just take some of this out some of these guys that are pointing straight down as well a lot of these low branches that are going towards the ground they're not likely to ever see sun or very much sun so i'm sort of jumping the gun and pruning things that the tree is eventually going to eliminate on its own most trees will self prune which just means that they will kill off their own branches when they don't get enough sun exposure and that's a pretty normal thing for trees to do so if your tree's got a whole bunch of little dead branches on the inside it's probably not a big deal because those are branches that just aren't seeing the sun and so the tree doesn't really need them those leaves aren't producing much they're using up more energy than they're consuming i mean then they're producing so this tree is a lot is a evergreen it's an evergreen deciduous tree which means that it's going to have its leaves all year round so i don't have the pleasure of pruning when it's totally dormant but at the same time it also means that i get to see real obviously which branches are already dead and which ones are not because a dead branch didn't have much for leaves on it so you can see here i'm going around this one actually has pretty good sun exposure but it's a little bit dense there's some crossing glimpse here so we'll free that up we'll go around here cut this low one here we've got another crosser here that one's kind of long and getting into this other guy's zone so we'll take it out so i want to point out the difference between a proper pruning cut and a heading cut some of these are pretty close so someone's pruned this before if you look here it's had a nice little pruning cut there there's a nice little pruning cut here and this one here and those are mostly pretty good this one's starting to get a little bit long so the difference between a pruning cut and a heading cut is if you look at a limb if we take this little branch for example and i want to stimulate growth in a particular direction let's say i want this limb to grow this way towards the sun well i want to prune away a section of branch that leaves a section of branch pointing the way i want so we look at this little tip right here we've got two bits of the branch one's going the wrong way one's going the right way and so what i'm gonna do to make a proper pruning cut is cut right at the union of that those two branches maybe we'll get a bigger branch here so you can see so i'm gonna make a little cut there i've got these cut resistant gloves that are help really i should cut that with a pass-through pruner so let's go bigger let's find a better branch all right over here is a better one okay so i've got this piece of the branch that's going down this one's coming out to my right going into the sun i kind of like both of those let's just say if i were let's just say i were to make the cut right here in the middle of the branch i say okay i'm going to cut that one off because that's an easy cut to make well that's what we call a heading cut this will tend to promote a bunch of growth responsive growth off the trunk right here around where that cut was made and that's gonna look ugly over time either that or it won't have anything and this will just be a dead rotting little stick but if we make this cut right here at the branch collar come around just barely big enough to warrant using a silky man that is ugly don't show your arborist friends all right so now we've got right at the branch collar now that's going to tend to create to stimulate growth in this part of the branch that i left and that's in this case that's what we want to do in fact this branch here is kind of turning all the way around and going up underneath where um where it's getting overshadowed over there so i think i'm probably going to eliminate this branch entirely or at least to this point so i'm going to make one more cut right here and try not to make a heading cut all right and now i left this little bit and so it should stimulate growth in this direction get rid of that now it's got some space to move see this i'll also tend to prune branches that are pointing straight down unless you're trying to get a droopy effect which can look really nice with certain trees this tree not so much [Music] right [Music] uh [Music] [Music] so all right so now i'm all wrapped up with that tree i wanna you take a look at it with me here so we've shaped it just a little bit i took out a few of the high tops that were shooting up in the middle so that there's a nice even distribution of sunlight sunlight will even has some areas to penetrate down onto the interior of the tree where there's still some foliage left we've lifted up the tips down low a little bit we've opened up the inside for some airflow i've removed quite a few dead branches and quite a few crossers and that's going to be a beautiful little tree here you could probably use a pruning similar in every couple of years but uh even if you were to just leave it alone at this point it'll be just fine because it's a native species and these live oaks are incredibly hardy they do really well so thank you for joining me it's ryder tree gear i hope this you found this informative and useful if you if you liked it let me know comment subscribe and i hope to see you next time thanks again you

Channel: Strider Trees

Views: 15,269

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Id: fj_nsTxJHbA

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020