How to Keep Your Trees Safe in the Winter
We tend to make the assumption that our trees can take care of themselves. After all, they’ve lived outside for all this time – just as they do in nature! They clearly manage just fine without human intervention, so why should you do anything to help keep your trees safe in the winter?
How to Keep Your Trees Safe in the Winter
Unfortunately, this point of view is a little short-sighted. Sure: trees are perfectly capable of surviving (and thriving) without human intervention! The problem is that the trees in your yard don’t have that option. They have already been “intervened with” and there is no going back now. Young and Newly planted trees and shrubs are especially vulnerable when repeatedly freezing and thawing.
After all, your trees certainly didn’t choose to live in your front/back yard! They certainly didn’t choose to grow huge distances from other trees like them. And they didn’t ask for you to pave the ground around them. Nor did they ask to be pulled away from the natural habitat where they would encounter animals and insects that actually help to maintain them.
In short: these are domesticated trees. Just like your dog wouldn’t survive a night in the woods, your trees are a little less hardy than their wild brethren! When winter descends, this can present some issues. So, what can you do to help out and keep your trees and shrubs safe in the winter?
Winter Tree Care Tips
Prune Your Trees
One thing to consider doing prior to winter is pruning. When you prune your trees, you are essentially removing branches and leaves that might otherwise get in the way.
Trees need light in order to thrive – even in the cold winter. When you have lots of leaves and the tree is completely overgrown, then leaves can end up blocking one another. This becomes even more of an issue if there are dead leaves in the way. This results in the tree not getting any light from the winter sun!
The idea of pruning trees in the winter is to ensure that a tree can absorb as much light as possible without blocking itself. When you do this prior to cold winter days, you are setting your trees up to thrive during the harshest months and that can only ever be a good thing!
Water Trees in the Winter
Trees need water, and while they might have access via babbling brooks in the local woods, there is likely no such source of water near you. Thus, when things get icy – or when you go for months on end without rain – your trees can get thirsty.
The most important role of water when it comes to your trees, is to help dilute nutrients so they can be flushed around the tree’s body. You’ve heard of water-soluble vitamins, and this is essentially what that means! Without water, your tree cannot use the vitamins in the soil. So spray and water the trees in winter from time to time to ensure they are healthy when spring rolls around.
Wrap Tree Trunks
One nasty condition that trees can experience during the winter months is something called “sunscald.” This is like a sunburn for trees. However, unlike human sunburn, the sunscald is most pronounced in trees during the winter months. That’s because it is actually caused by the sun repeatedly thawing frozen bark, causing cells to expand and contract, and eventually rupture.
To make sure this isn’t a problem for your trees, you should consider using a crepe paper tree wrap and wrap the trunk of your trees. Overlap the layers and stop the wrap where you reach the lowest branches.
Mulch Around The Base of Trees
Finally, one of the very best things you can do to protect your trees is to use mulch around the base of your trees. A thick layer of mulch insulates the tree’s roots from the cold air, while at the same time reducing the amount of snow and ice that can freeze the soil. This in turn means that your tree will be less likely to be harmed directly by the cold and heavy snow, but also that it will continue to receive nutrients and water through the changing soil temperatures.
Mulch is extremely easy to use: just take a little and scatter it beneath the tree’s drip line. Don’t pile it up against the tree trunk however and don’t mulch until the temperature drops and the ground freezes (as otherwise, you might find that mice start using the mulch as a place to live!).
Omaha Tree Services
At Omaha Tree, we recycle all of our wood waste material from the trees we trim and remove in the greater Omaha metro area. The wood waste material is brought back to our 8-acre site at 3606 McKinley Street, where it is processed into a beautiful & consistent mulch product that is local, fresh, and clean. Contact us today.
