A good chunk of my work the last few months has been a dwarf mistletoe removal project in a 20 acre (30? I forget) stand of ponderosa pine. If a tree is fully infested, it goes. (I climb and trim whichever ones can be saved.) While I fell a significant number of trees, I like to keep a dead tree here and there for habitat, especially if it’s big and open-grown. So I girdled one such tree back in Feb. (Jan.?). Knowing that a simple kerf surrounding a tree can be insufficient to kill it, I cut one kerf into sapwood all the way around, then another about a bar’s width (3-4”?) below. Then I bored through under bark, going around the tree between the two kerfs and leaving clean white wood.
That damn tree is thriving. We came through with the chipper a couple weeks back and I repeated the bore cut to remove the pitch that I guess is protecting this thing. Yet today when we showed up to continue work, you could assess the tree above the girdling and not suspect it wears a white belt.
Someone ’splain that to me.
That damn tree is thriving. We came through with the chipper a couple weeks back and I repeated the bore cut to remove the pitch that I guess is protecting this thing. Yet today when we showed up to continue work, you could assess the tree above the girdling and not suspect it wears a white belt.
Someone ’splain that to me.