Cuts at the collar, weight off the roof

What a proper pruning cut looks like

Every cut on a tree you're keeping comes off at the branch collar, that swollen ring where the limb meets the trunk. The collar holds the cells that grow a seal over the wound. Cut outside it and you leave a stub that dies back and rots inward. Cut inside it, flush to the bark, and the seal leaves with the limb, so the tree's got nothing to close with. What you want is a small round wound that's already rolling over at the edges by the end of the season.

Anything with real weight on it comes off in three cuts. Undercut the bottom of the limb a foot or so out. Second cut from the top, just past the first, and the weight drops clean. Then the finish cut at the collar with nothing left to tear. Skip that undercut on a wet laurel oak and the bark peels a strip down the trunk when the limb goes, and no dressing fixes that. It's the most common thing we find on a tree somebody else pruned.

Where the cut goes depends on what you're cutting. A live oak carries interior growth, so it can be thinned without hurting it. A slash pine doesn't work that way at all. Pull a limb off a pine trunk and you get a wound that sits open and bleeds resin for months, so pines get deadwood and clearance and little else. Jean Dawson said it in her review: "Jacob is very professional and knows about the different types of trees and where to cut them for healthy results."

• Cuts made at the collar, never flush
• Three cut method on every heavy limb
• Deadwood and crossing limbs pulled out
• Clearance over roof, drive and pool cage
• Debris chipped and the drive blown clean

Clearance over the roof and the drive

Most of what we trim here is a laurel oak or a live oak leaning over a one story block house with a shingle roof. Those limbs do two things to a roof. They drag on the shingles every time the wind moves and wear the granules off in a stripe you can spot from the street. They also hold shade and damp on a surface that needs to be dry by mid morning. A roof under heavy canopy stays wet, and wet roofs down here grow black streaks and green film.

Raising the crown over a drive is its own piece of work. You want clean height for a truck, and you want it taken evenly off the underside so the tree doesn't wind up with all its leaves in the top. Street side, a sidewalk needs one height and the pavement needs more. Corner lot, there's the sight line at the stop sign to think about too. We cut to the collar on the lowest limbs and leave the ones above them to fill in.

Screen enclosures are the part people forget about until it costs them. An aluminum pool cage will take a year of small oak twigs and shrug them off. Then one dead limb the size of your arm punches through a panel and bends the frame under it. Same story over a carport, or over a manufactured home in one of the parks around Palmetto, where the roof panel is thin and there's no attic under it to slow anything down. Deadwood over a structure comes out first. Cosmetic work waits.

Thinning for wind, not hat racking

Wind work is mostly about end weight. A laurel oak throws long flat laterals that keep reaching, and the further one reaches, the harder it pries on the trunk every time a gust hits it. Thickness doesn't keep up. So we shorten those laterals back to a side branch big enough to take over as the new end, and we pull the crossing and rubbing wood out of the middle so air has somewhere to go. Done right, the tree still looks like itself. Just lighter at the tips, with sky showing through in patches.

There are two ways this goes wrong, and both come from doing too much. Strip the inside of a limb, leave a tuft of leaves on the end, and you've built a sail on a bare pole. Worse in a blow than what you started with. Top the whole tree back to stubs, which people around here call hat racking, and every stub throws a fistful of shoots that grip the bark and never tie into the wood underneath. Those come out in the first real wind. Neither mistake can be undone.

Pines don't answer pruning the way a hardwood does. A sand pine or a slash pine keeps its live crown up top, and cutting too much of that away starves the tree and brings beetles into the resin wells. So on a pine we take the dead limbs and the ones over the house. That's it. On an oak we'll take a modest share of the live canopy in one visit and come back another year for the rest, because a tree that loses too many leaves at once throws everything into regrowth and nothing into roots.

Climbing a tree you plan to keep

Spikes go on a tree that's coming down, never on one that's staying. Every gaff hole punches through the bark into the layer that moves water up the trunk, and one climb up and back down leaves a whole column of them for fungus to find. On a tree we're keeping, the climber goes up on a rope and a saddle and works off tie in points inside the canopy. Slower on the clock, yes. It's also the difference between a pruned tree and a damaged one.

Where a limb lands gets planned before the saw touches it. Lots in the older parts of town are tight: pool cage on one side, the neighbor's block wall on the other, a service drop through the middle, and flower beds under the whole thing. Anything that can't free fall gets tied off and lowered on a rope, piece by piece, with somebody on the ground running the line. That's why an hour of cutting turns into most of a morning. It's also why nothing ends up on your screen.

Cleanup is part of the job, same as the cutting. Brush goes into the chipper as it comes down, so the yard never fills up. Then the drive gets blown off and the beds get raked out, instead of chip and leaf left sitting on your mulch. Sod under a drop zone takes a beating if you let big wood hit it. So the heavy pieces come down on the rope, and they get bucked up over bare ground or plywood where they can't dent anything.

When to prune in this climate

Structural work on a hardwood belongs in the cooler, drier months, when the tree is moving slow and the wound isn't sitting in warm wet air all day. Prune an oak in July around here and you're cutting into heat and afternoon rain, which is exactly when decay fungus is hunting for a fresh face. Deadwood is the exception. A dead limb has nothing left to lose, so pulling one out over a roof or a walkway is right any month of the year.

The other half of timing is the rush. Once a named storm is a couple of days out, every tree company in Manatee County is booked solid and the only work anybody's doing is emergency work. Weight reduction and clearance are worth handling long before that, while there's time to make proper cuts and come back for a second look. A tree pruned ahead of the season drops less into your yard, and the limbs that were going to fail are already chipped and gone.

Young trees are the easiest pruning there is, and the first thing people skip. An oak planted in a new yard sets its permanent branch structure early, and a few small cuts then decide whether it grows one strong leader or a fork that splits out over the house down the road. Sometimes a tree needs nothing, and we'll tell you that. Walking the property and marking what should come off now and what can wait is part of the estimate.