How to Keep Your Trees Healthy and Care for Them

Whether you have several basic maple trees in your front yard or a front and backyard covered with a variety of lush greenery, it’s crucial to give your greenery the care and attention it needs to continue growing strong and lush.

Use our tree maintenance guide to help keep your trees in peak condition when the summer season heats up and so they may continue to give your family with natural beauty, shade, and enjoyment for many years to come.

Table of Contents

Know What They Need

You must be aware of the types of trees that are present on your land in order to provide them with the right care. Investigate the following points after conducting the necessary study to identify the trees you are working with:

What level of water does your tree require?
What kind of groundwork is ideal for its roots?
Is your tree at risk from drought?
Has your tree a sensitivity to anything, like strong winds?

Call our Burbank tree service experts if you need help recognizing the trees that are present on your land.

Pruning them correctly

For your trees to remain robust and healthy, pruning is essential. However, improper pruning can actually harm your plants, causing instability and the spread of disease.

Using our tree pruning advice as a reference, you’ll want to prune your trees correctly to maintain them healthy throughout the season. Watch out for the following indications of improper pruning:

a top-heavy or bottom-heavy tree
the cuts are jagged
a tree that leans too much to one side
a tree that is shaded by another tree from the sunshine
Guard their roots

Healthy soil is necessary for healthy roots, which in turn require healthy trees. You should make sure that the soil surrounding your tree is healthy enough to support its greens and that it is not compacted, as this inhibits water and oxygen from reaching the tree’s roots.

Make careful to safeguard the soil and roots in your tree’s essential root zone, which is indicated by the drip line of the tree. Imagine a circle around your tree on the ground that corresponds to where the branches extend to identify the drip line. In this crucial, sensitive area, you must be careful not to alter the soil’s slope or compact it, as doing so could harm your tree.

Water them effectively

Effective watering is one of the most crucial ways to care for and preserve the greenery on your lawn and yard since water is food for your trees and plants.

A few times a week during the summer, you should be sure to give your trees a thorough watering. A once-in-awhile soak is far more efficient than a regular water misting.

Your trees often don’t need watering in the winter, unless they were just planted.

Apply mulch

Mulch is a fantastic technique to give your trees stress protection while also improving the appearance of the whole property. However, mulching should not be done carelessly since this could hurt your trees’ roots and do more harm than good.

You should begin your mulch around 6 inches from the base of your tree and continue it all the way to the tree’s drip line, where it should terminate just below the tree’s end of canopy. Use one inch of mulch at the tree’s base and four inches (but no more) at the circle’s outermost point.

You can help ensure that your lush greenery will continue to grow healthy and strong all year long by identifying your trees, understanding their needs, caring for them with the proper watering, pruning, and mulching practices, and safeguarding their priceless roots.

How do you save a stressed tree?

Water should be given at least twice per week to plants growing in sandy soil, new transplants, and trees with damaged roots. New plantings should have their watering directed towards the root ball. The suggested amount of water should be applied to established crops on clay or loam soils at least once per week.

What is best food for trees?

Typically, fertilizer applied to trees in ratios of 2-1-1 or 3-1-1 produces the best results (nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium). The ratios of the fertilizers 18-6-12, 12-6-6, 10-6-4, 10-8-6, and 10-8-4 are typical or similar.

What is the best time to fertilize trees?

During the Spring. Trees and shrubs should be treated in the early spring, and if conditions are favorable for plant growth, a small fertilizer application can be done in the early summer (that is, reasonable temperatures and soil moisture). Avoid fertilizing drought-stressed trees and shrubs in the summer.

How often should I fertilize my trees?

Young trees that are expanding quickly should be nourished annually to encourage rapid growth. Last but not least, older trees only require tree fertilizer every two to three years to preserve their vitality and brilliant foliage color.

Do you need to water after fertilizing?

According to the fertilizer. While certain weed-and-feed solutions, for example, require watering a day or two after fertilizing, other lawn nutrients, such as some, function better when watered in immediately after application. All of it boils down to this: When to water is specified in the product directions on the bag.

Do you apply fertilizer before or after rain?

It is ideal to apply fertilizer a day or two after a rain. Any pools of water will be gone by this time, but the ground will still be moist. Fertilizer should not be applied to wet grass blades. Check the weather forecast to ensure there will be some sunshine.

If you have more questions regarding tree care, don’t hesitate to ask us or give us a call and we’ll handle it for you. From tree trimming in Irvine to Pasadena and San Fernando Valley, we cover the entire LA region and provide complete tree care services ranging from tree care to emergency tree removal and land clearing.

Check out our other blog posts for more useful tree care tips and information.