Tree and Shrub Care: Tips to Care for Your Trees and Shrubs

It’s not just your lawn that needs attention during the summer and fall. Your trees and shrubs need to be taken care of too. It’s easy to forget about the health of your ornamentals because they can usually take care of themselves. Whether you are caring for a new tree or an old mature tree, there are a lot of things you need to consider to ensure they live a healthy life. Here are a few tree and shrub care tips to keep your ornamentals healthy all year.

Choose the Right Tree

Before you buy and plant a tree, you need to make sure it will do well in your yard. Some things to take into consideration include: climate, amount of light, and soil type. You may also want to ask yourself if you’re looking for a shade tree or an ornamental. Do you want bright fall colors or are you trying to brighten up your winter landscape? Take a look at these fast growing Michigan trees to get an idea of what will do best in your yard.

Choosing the Right Place

Trees are for life, if everything goes right, so choosing the right spot for it to live for the foreseeable future is very important. When you plant, you need to look ahead into the future and imagine how big the tree is going to get.

Where not to plant trees:

Under or near power lines
Close to your house or other buildings
Cose to sidewalks
Too close to other trees

The best places to plant trees are:

For deciduous trees: Plant in the southeast and southwest sides of your property to keep your yard shaded in summer.
For evergreens: Plant on the north side of your yard to block winter winds.

Deep Root Fertilization

Fertilizing your trees is another part of proper lawn care. Tree fertilization is a little different than how you would fertilize your lawn or garden. Spreading out fertilizer around the base of your tree is not as effective as you may think. Tree roots can be several feet below the surface so, unless it rains a lot, the nutrients aren’t going to make it down to the roots before they dissipate in the soil or are stolen by your grass and other plants.

For this reason, deep root feeding was invented. Fertilizers are injected, using specialized equipment under high pressure, directly into the roots of the tree. This results in quicker absorption, better root growth, and visibly healthier trees in a fraction of the time.

Pruning

Pruning might seem like a purely aesthetic step in tree care but it does have its benefits. As the tree grows, it’s only natural that some branches die off or get so heavy that they droop low, causing you to hit your head when you mow. Pruning out dead and obnoxious branches actually benefits the tree by redirecting nutrients to other parts of the tree.

Pest Control

One of the biggest threats to trees are diseases and the pests that transmit them. The two biggest names in Michigan are the elm bark beetle and the emerald ash borer which have decimated the elm and ash populations in the state so much that transporting of logs from these trees is forbidden. But these aren’t the only pests that feed on your trees.

Common tree pests in Michigan include:

Japanese beetles
Tent worms
Aphids
Gypsie moths
Asian longhorn beetles

Dormant oil is an application of an oil spray that is applied in the spring or in the fall while the tree is dormant. The oils cover up and smother any living creature residing or overwintering on your trees. It also kills eggs, preventing them from hatching and infesting your trees in the spring.

Hire The Professionals.

Do you need help with your tree care? Call the professionals at Turf Tenders. We have years of experience dealing with trees and the pests that harm them. With out tree and shrub program you will have visibly more attractive ornamentals that you and your grandkids can be proud of.

Just call (248) 541-5296 or leave us a message.