Yes, all the way to aquatic spiders.. the thread has turned into a new direction!
:monkey:
Yes, all the way to aquatic spiders.. the thread has turned into a new direction!
Here is the answer!
You CANNOT leave the water in the tree! It will continue to rot , and make a bigger hole for more water! Plus , when the temp gets below 32 , it will freeze , expand and make the tree split! DO NOT stick your hand in the whole with a cup to dip the water out! SNAKES , SPIDERS , and all kind of unfriendly objects/living beings tend to live in these areas!
1 cut a small groove up wards to let water drain out
2 let area dry for a week if no rain
3 spray area with pruning spray
4 FILL WITH FOAM , YOU HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE
5 spray again with pruning spray!
:monkey:
I disagree. We see some freezing here in Wisconsin. In all my years of climbing, I have never seen water in a tree freeze and crack a tree, and I've seen a lot of trees and I always stop to inspect cavities, it's part of an arborist's job.
Wood has a high percentage of water in it, ninety something percent, and as such, it already expands and contracts with freezing and thawing, almost as much as water itself.
A cavity forms when there is an injury of some sort, typically a limb dies and falls off. The tree sets up defensive walls around the area, both physical and chemical walls. Alex Shigo dubbed this as CODIT, Compartmentalization Of Decay In Trees.
The wood on the outside of these walls is abandoned, and will often decay away leaving a hole. It has not been shown that the presence of water in holes has any effect on the decay rate of the abandoned wood. Shigo even speculated that it could slow decay.
Filling the hole with foam probably does little or nothing to the decay rate. Wood contains plenty of moisture to support wood decay fungi and other organisms, even if you dry it out for a week, and month, or a year.
Foam will however discourage wildlife, and that is one of the things I like about trees, but to each his own.
Those walls I spoke of are what is important. Don't drill or cut into the area. Once you cut through the CODIT walls, there is little to stop the decay from moving into healthy wood. I repeat, don't cut or drill into an injury.
I will second the recommendation for Shigo's Modern Arboriculture, and New Tree Biology. For a guy like you in the tree service, they are mandatory reading.
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