Hi all, I bought this property about 2 years ago. The previous owners did nothing for the trees, which seems to be good and bad. I have 3 trees which need major attention and this is the 1st of them. Thanks for any help/input.
I think your intuition on where to cut is correct, as is your thought that rot continues further down. Depending on how much decay there is, (heart-wood might be all gone!) you can make a hammock out of duct-tape and fill the void with Great-stuff foam sealant. This will expand and give you a pretty water-proof barrier. Cut at an angle as you intended to and do some horticultural stuff to make the tree happier. Even hollow it could out-live us. It did not appear to have much of a target, but tough to tell how sturdy it will remain.Sorry I should have specified, I was climbing with a 2in1 lanyard, no spikes. The tree is easy enough to climb without bothering with my srt setup.
I have stood inside several hundred year old Oaks that were completely hollow. If they have plenty of other trees to take the bite out of the wind they will usually stand through the storms. This is a Live Oak, and the wood is especially hard, and yet can handle wind. As long as it was not near my house I'd stop cutting where you just said was a good place to cut. Clean out soft debris if the decay continues below the cut, and once you have good clean edges for the great stuff to stick to, make a tape hammock 6-8 inches deep - (or you will use a lot of expensive foam!) and make a nice dome of stuff for water to run off of. If you can see the top, paint it dark grey. S.O.D. is not yet in the south-east, though something is killing Red-Oaks in TN.Fortunately, UF says sudden oak death has not killed any trees in FL yet. I have a few trees with co-dominant leaders and included bark. It wouldn't surprise me if something like that happened to this tree in the past(trees #2 and#3 are both much older and have this problem). I have read that sealing wounds is ineffective, any other thoughts on this?
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