With a year-round maintenance calendar for commercial tree care, you can custom-design an upkeep schedule that perfectly aligns with your property’s actual needs. You can easily add to the calendar as needed when you plant new trees or alter your landscaping in other ways. The tasks you’ll want to focus on most are pruning, deep watering, mulching, and pest treatments.
When Should You Prune and Trim the Trees?
If you prune and trim the trees during winter and early spring, they’ll be dormant. All of the leaves will have fallen, completely revealing their structural skeleton, making it incredibly easy to spot dead, diseased, and poorly attached limbs. These are the ones you want to remove before they fall and cause an injury. Removing the diseased ones also helps prevent decay and disease from spreading to healthy branches.
When Should You Mulch?
Mulching is an essential maintenance task that can make all the difference in how healthy your trees stay throughout the year. Adding a fresh layer during spring helps shield the root systems from intense heat once summer rolls around. Adding another layer in late fall insulates them from freezing winter temperatures. Just be careful with the type of mulch you use. Most trees benefit from shredded bark or wood chip mulches, as these gradually break down and improve the soil.
When Should You Add Pest Treatments?
You’ll need a proactive, highly targeted schedule for your pest control efforts. Ideally, you’ll start in late winter by applying a dormant oil to destroy insect eggs that survive the winter. But you’ll also want to continue treatments throughout spring to prevent active chewers and borers from feeding on the trees’ new growth. As you’re marking your calendar for this task, think about the life cycle of local pests. You may want to target aphids in early spring, when they’re most active, and borers in late spring and summer, when they’re laying eggs or tunneling beneath the bark.
When Should You Deep-Water the Root Systems?
Most experts recommend deep watering several times throughout the year, especially during periods of drought. And you may not need to water all of the trees, only the newly planted ones. The best way to tell which ones need watering is to check the soil moisture around the root zone. You can do this by using a soil moisture meter. If it reads dry, it’s time to get out the water hose. Many commercial properties install automated irrigation systems equipped with soil moisture sensors that water the trees only when the soil becomes too dry. This method makes tree maintenance much easier and less time-consuming. You can even adjust the moisture threshold to help prevent overwatering the trees, which is harmful to their health and costly to your water bills.
No two commercial properties are exactly the same, which is exactly what makes a custom maintenance calendar so valuable. You can tweak it as needed to ensure your trees stay healthy and beautiful. When you need commercial tree services in San Carlos, CA, contact West Coast Tree Care.
