- when the bark is thick enough to prevent damage to the cambium;
Even this one has fallen to the wayside, Phelogen in the bark can create infection courts.
Has anybody ever seen any long term negative impact from maple production on trees?
The difference with sugar bush work is that the holes are drilled, thus cleaner then a gaff wound, and far apart. The biggest problem with gaff wounds is that they line up along the weakest protection boundary; wall one.
and probably do it a lot faster than the 100 or more open wounds made with a saw....
Why do you always ignore the branch protection zone that I always bring up with this perennial argument? I'll refer back to my wall one argument above also.
Also, if pruning cuts are too close together they will coalesce into one large canker, which is why we should thin lower canopy vs the old raise and gut method that the ignorant workers still use.
why don't you just admit that it's just pure aesthetics and a sales pitch because that's all it is.......your not going to make me believe that a saw cut will close before a 1/2 spike wound....
Treeseer, really? That's the best you can come up with? A tree hit by lightning, "root abused," that had old pruning cuts (nod to rftreeman theory), and was spiked. And this tree is your proof that spikes kill? Weak.
not really, though he had a better one in an oak I worked on after the big ice storm they had 8-9 years ago. The spike wounds had turned into cankers that were merging together.
I think the biggest problem we have with our arguments is that we dumb them down to "it'll kill the tree!" The fact is that is is an additional stressor that the tree is forced to deal with, this is a sap on the stored energy, and a loss of conductive tissue, the wounds are lined up along the vascular pathways. That the wounds are in the most effective xylem is an addition problem.
We wound the tree with the actual pruning, so it has to close those wounds and deal with the loss of photosynthate, if we spike the prune we have additional wounding that must be dealt with while using a compromised vascular system.
Common scientific knowledge once was that the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth.
that was not scientific knowledge, but faith based. Because the people before them believed that the world was flat, it was taken as an article of faith that this was so. In actuality many people who had to work the world on a large scale knew that the world was not flat for hundreds of years before Galileo
i know trees that have been spiked on a five year cycle for decades, and they are still thriving.
this is the difference between anecdotal evidence and science. A few trees stick out in your mind, and are still living. no other factor is taken into concideration, and the fact that the trees are still alive seems to rule out that spiking is not bad.
Once again, we need to stop saying that it will kill trees, but that is not good for their overall health.
We do almost 10k taps a year. We have sugar maples that have had three or four taps a year for forty years. That's got to be a lot more damaging than some spike tracks, yet never hear a bad word about it.
What, are city trees better than country trees? That line right there is one of the reasons i'm not a big ansi fan.
The difference here is that arboriculture and forestry are two different disciplines. With urban trees we often are tending trees as individuals, so that the loss of one tree is a greater loss then if one tree in a large stand dies from a lower standard of treatment.
This is the way I view the use of spikes. Why am I maintaining a given tree in a certain way? I differentiate trim from prune as the former dose not work with the plants natural growth patterns. So if i am trimming a tree in a stand for line of site where I am creating major stresses that will put it's long term viability into question, I will probably gaff it to save the client some money. This is especially true with spring-poles that a climbing line will bend over when placed optimally.
To sum this all up, we are paid to maintain a persons property in the best way possible. If the tree is to stay in a landscape for as long as possible then we need to minimize stress as much as possible. Pruning causes harm to the tree, so we need to do other things that will not exacerbate the necessary harm that the pruning will cause.
Forget it.. do it the best way we know how with the knowledge we have at our disposal. Not saying that 20 years from now we may do some things differently, but today use what we have as best practices.
........somebody give that man his well deserved number 8 nova.....
