Ecavating a lake around large live oaks, how far...........

[Matty99]

I am going to excavate a lake of about an acre or so. There are some large live oaks that i will need to go around. how far from the base of the tree should i stay in circumference. if i get the ends of some small roots, will it likely be detrimental? i need some input on this one. I have decided to leave the spanish moss alone in the old trees. they been like that for hudreds of years i suppose.


Matty

 

[treeclimber165]

I'd try to stay out at least past the canopy. This will keep you from getting into any major roots. A healthy tree can replace a few smaller roots without skipping a beat. However, a stressed tree with few reserves can be fatally injured if too many roots are cut.

 

[budroe69moni]

i agree w/ treeclimber, do not dig inside of the drip-line!
the further away the better. when was the last time you
fertilized the trees in question???? when do you plan on digging?
are they healthy??? any stress on the tree?????
peace,
budroe
p.s. how much land do you have, digging a 1 acre pond and all....

 

[Matty99]

I have bought 27 acres. it has many giant oaks on it. the lake is going to be an acre or so. I will post some pics of them soon.



Matty

 

[Tom Dunlap]

What are you thinking? IF the trees have been growing fine what do you think is going to happen when you cut off a lot of their roots and then flood the ones that you don't amputate? Why not be merciful and kill the trees now before your slowly choke them?

Don't start on that line of staying outside the dripline. That imaginary line is where the tree will finally start to loose parts of itself that can't be supported.

What's the point of making this lake? Tr

Trees are incredibly tolerant of the abuses humans foist on them. They'll limp along for many years and then fall over. The God gets blamed and the insurance company pays to remove the tree. On Thursday I have a job scheduled to remove a large maple tree that was left between two houses when they were built around 25 years ago. The tree has been getting thinner aand the bark is falling off in sheets. Upon close inspection, actually not too close, I found that all of the major buttress roots are dead. The tree had been left on the top of a little knob and the soil graded away when the houses were built. Could I prove that the contractor killed the tree? I think so. I would relish being on a retainer to do the investigation. Getting the responsibility to stick to the contractor would be a fun job.

The oaks that you plan on moating may live for x months or years. When do you feel like your responsibility for the damage to the roots expires?

Leave the trees alone.

Tom

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

The dripline is the minimum closenes, excavate as far from the edge of the oaks as possible, and make a retaining wall around.

Devise a tree preservation plan with the excivation company. Ensure that nay triming is done by or supervised by an arborist. Allow no traffic, parking or storage under the canopy of the trees. if a path is needed, deep mulh it to reduce soil compaction.

Call these areas Tree Protection Zones.

One of the biggest killers of trees after construction is soil compaction, the loss of soil pores reduces gass exchange and roots start to die. It takes many years for the decline to start showing up in the canopy. then it is often too late to remidiate.

 

[Kneejerk Bombas]

I think a guy from MN(Land of 10,000 Lakes) might put a lower value on the addition of a pond than a guy from TX. I would argue that a well done pond could have many more ecological benifits than a handful of trees.

If you stay out side the dripline <B>and </B>keep damage to one side of the tree, it should survive. If you cut roots of a mature tree, at the dripline, on more than one side, it will most likely die.

Burying roots is just as bad as cutting them off. Soil compaction is also bad. So watch what you do with all the extra soil from the pond digging.

 

[Reed]

Oaks vs Water

Have to lean towards Tom on this one.

I'm from Minnesota (lake heaven) but live in Texas. I know the virtue of water here, it's benefits and costs.

I also know live oaks faily well. It's what I do here, have been since moving down from the north 20 years ago.

Die-off and stress related factors. It's very difficult advising on oak trees and what they require, what kills them, what we can do to supplement them. Texas soils and the nature of these giants already represent a delicate and unique paradox, especially in light of the wilt epidemic. Our advocacy here is stringent, based on presenting the trees with as little stress as possible, up to and including hands-off ground cover management, a difficult pill to swallow especially on the high-dollar dynasty ranches with mega-million dollar homesites.

If I could count how many hundreds of motts or individual trees that have died as a result of landscape changes, everyone would implement a more responsible approach to making a bit of land more attractive to their needs as oppossed to the tree's needs. Waterscapes especially. Root systems have been measured beyond 300 feet in our shallow rocky soils - one principle reason wilt has become such a voracious mover. Submersion even beyond the academic communities' standards of feeding area have left countless dead oaks here, only a handful of remedies exist, all costly and significant changes one must follow to insure no damage done, but as of yet I've never witnessed one implemented, only dead trees someone asks me to rectify - dead trees they want returned to full health again and yet they still don't understand the full course of reactions associated with their actions.

Flooding land, land that had never evolved as a marsh, is a significant change. It goes beyond something becoming wet when it had always been dry. Chemical changes will occur, biomes become where they never existed before. Most of our disease observations from both airborne and microscopic viewpoints implicate the worst destruction, the most virulent diseases, the highest mortality rates are always in and around areas altered by man. It moves outward from there.

You will certainly find a "tree expert" willing to consult on your questions, provide a treatise and directives that will help you establish that pond, but in my professional opinion based on countless examinations of die-offs here relating to live oaks, I'd have to agree with Tom on this one. You really can't have both the oaks and the water in proximity. Not if they didn't evolve together.

Reed

 

[Tom Dunlap]

I think a guy from MN(Land of 10,000 Lakes) might put a lower value on the addition of a pond than a guy from TX.

What does residency have to do with tree preservation? Even though there's over ten thousanc lakes in MN and only one natural lake in Texas [so I'm told] doesn't mean that its in the tree's best interest to blend the environments. How well would white pine do out on the prairies a hundred miles west of here? Look at the biome that you're messing with.

I would argue that a well done pond could have many more ecological benifits than a handful of trees.

What reason is there to have a pond in an arid biome? How would you measure the "ecological benefits"? How would the death of a "handful of trees" be brought into the scheme? Trees are the biggest critters in the area but what about all of the other plants and animals?

There are lots of ponds and water features out in suburbia that are a pretty poor replacement for the wetlands and drainages that were in place before sprawl took over.

George Harrison said it pretty well:

It's as if some wish'd
Mother Nature they'd control

Leave the trees alone.

Tom

PS Think about advising the use of the "dripline" as a tree protection zone. What about Lombardy Poplar or other columnar trees. What about woods grown trees that are tall and spindly? There's a better formula and a lot of other information in this article:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/housingandclothing/DK6135.html

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

If the dripline were being used as a general ROT I would join you, but these are wide spreading trees so I did not think any caveats were needed or a (dbh / 12)x 2.5 or whatever the ROT formulae dejuer is.

My understanding of the question is "We're going to do this, so what is the best way."

Don't is not a legitimate answer, it can be a preamble though.

Don't but if you do, be prepaired for it to not last. Treat the TPZ as a Fabrige egg. and dont have the pond water level high wenough so that the trees will be saturated soil all the time.

Hire Reed Hold to consult for you on the project.

The bottom line is that we dont know what it will do, but we know how to eliminate variables that will contribute to decline.

 

[treeclimber165]

A lot of the issues here raise some good points since my first response. This raises some questions:
1) Do you NEED to put the pond next to the live oaks, or did you just decide to put it there because you wanted the live oaks hanging over the water?
2) Do you have enough flexibility to dig the pond away from the live oaks and plant new trees around it? This way the new trees establish themselves in a waterfront environment and will be more likely to live than the existing live oaks.

This way you will have TWO nice areas, the live oak cluster AND a nice pond with trees!:angel:

 

[Matty99]

Well its like this folks. I don't have to put the lake where it is slated, but it is in the woods. i have cleared, or underbrushed the area for the lake,being sure to stay well away from the oaks. i have spent great care to go around the oaks as far as i thought i needed to. i had to take out some larger timber to do this. the water level will be around three feet from the ground level.
Twenty two years ago a man i knew did this very same thing. However! he dug very close to the oak trees, about ten feet, just on one side, and today this place looks like god created it. all of the oak trees have so far survived and continue to grow beautifully. i however, will be digging on one side only also but have opted to stay at least at the drip line. These trees he has are 10 feet from the waters edge and have done fine. What he did was dig very careful and shallow at first then went on down, i thought for sure they were dead, and they may be later on, but i would think they might have shown some signs in 22 years if they were damaged. Also, some people around here have put driveways of all kinds right between large oaks and they are still looking good. this was back when i was still riding a bicycle, am 42 now and i have driven over there to see how they are doing and seems to be fine. ashalt is still there 2-3 feet from all of the trees this drive goes through. same people still live there.
I don't know what to do, but have taken note on some things that i have seen in the past that seem to have worked for them. i have not counted them, but could say that i have around 60 of these old trees, some younger than others, and yes i agree, that not one should die if i can help it, but it might happen, ya never know. i know i have taken more thought into this than a lot of subdivisions and grocery store sites. seem some MIGHTY oaks laying on the ground when they really did'nt have to.


Matty