Thinning Things Out

My hair is getting more and more gray with each passing day.  I'm okay with it and haven't considered hair products to color the grey.  On the bright side, at least for now, although it is turning grey, it hasn't started turning loose.  It is still thick and when I go get a haircut, the barber often pulls out some thinning shears like shown below to thin things out a bit.

Image Credit

I thought of the haircut analogy the other day when I started an undertaking in trimming one of our live oak trees.  It had a lot of interior growth that just needed to be cleaned up. A friend of ours had his live oaks trimmed and the price tag was way more than what I wanted to fork over, so I started trimming this tree and it will take me about a week or so of plugging away at it before I get it completed, but I made a good start.

Of course I did a lot of googling of how to properly trim a live oak.  Here's a little bit of what I learned:

1. Don't trim flush with the limb or you'll take off the collar that helps your tree scab over and heal,
2. Take off all the dead and diseased limbs,
3. Remove any lower limbs that are growing upward to the crown as this will help airflow,
4. Cut away branches that rub together,
5. Trim off 'ugly' looking branches. (Oh, I have one more thing I'll show you at the end that I learned by making a mistake!)

I used a big extension ladder to get myself up where I needed to be to trim with a chain saw, a pole saw, and and hand saw.  The ladder was equally effective in getting me up high as well as making my wife nervous.  I'm not afraid of heights.

Unlike my wife, the cows, goats, and chickens were pleased with my new project because I threw the limbs I trimmed over the fence and the animals ate the leaves and the chickens found bugs and such to eat amongst the leaves and branches.

In THIS POST and another post referenced in that  one, I tell of  how we repaired this live oak that had split down the middle by cabling it together.  You can see a cable spanning a two of the large limbs and pulled tight with a turnbuckle in the photo below:

After a recent storm I noticed that one of the two cables supporting the great weight of the mighty oak had come loose.

I quickly diagnosed the problem - the weight of the tree pulling against the turnbuckle had straightened out one of the hooks, allowing the turnbuckle to release from the eye bolt anchored in the tree.  I'll need t fix that as we are smack dab in the middle of  hurricane season and I don't want to leave the tree vulnerable.

Okay, back to the lesson I learned the hard way.  When you make a cut, you are supposed to paint the fresh cut with some black spray paint.  Newly cut wood is sweet smelling and attracts bugs that will bore into your tree, introducing disease. Painting the cut helps to reduce the risk of bug damage.

You can see my mistake at the seven o'clock position in the photo below.  Rather than doing what I knew to do and make my first cut at the bottom of the limb, I cut from the top. With no bottom cut, the weight of the cut limb tore some of the bark off of the bottom.  That could have been eliminated, but the tree will heal.  I'll just do it right from this point forward.

With the tree trimming about 50% done on this live oak, I think it looks a lot cleaner  and opened up the view under the expansive canopy that just makes the tree look better.  It should also allow a little more sunlight that will perk up the St. Augustine grass that grows beneath the tree's branches.  We all benefit from a little thinning out from time to time.