So my major tree-trimming lesson for this year is that spring growth (from overwinter root reserves) causes long, adventurous solo shoots but summer growth (from locally collected sunlight) causes bushier fractal growth, but available water is a limiting factor in both cases.
So in areas with rainy springs, after you thin out a canopy it’s important to keep the tree watered through summer so the holes opened up are filled in by adjacent branches poofing out rather than just new spring-growth branches from lower down.
Dealing with a tree trimming situation where I want a tree to expand in one direction but I simultaneously don’t want it to get totally thick in that direction until something underneath gets enough sun the leading edge of growth goes up further
Just left my chair by the side window and went to piss and looked out the bathroom window at the backyard and holy shit, this place is really coming together! Real payoff for not making compromises all those years — or rather, the compromise was putting up with the previous squalor until I had all my ducks lined up to take the next step towards final state.
Realizing from growth rates that the two trees out there in the upper backyard were younger than I’d thought when I moved in, and combining with what I know of the previous residents’ plot arc, “tended by a methhead until he left his methhead girl and kid and she ignored it for a decade” actually explained the shape they were in pretty well.
Now that they’re all fully trimmed and growth won’t make problems worse, and I added good piles of mulch around the bases (with a layer of bark nuggets on top that will over years decay into the base for more bark nuggets), seeing huge returns on watering trees in terms of summer growth, though I’m sure the relatively cool and moist year helps.
Makes some bushes I’d been trying to trim tight real leggy, though, so hold off on that.
Oh God, I have trimmed all the trees around the house so perfectly that this year’s new growth is proceeding in perfect accordance with and fulfillment of my plans, I just did a full circuit and there were only like five shoots that were not merely dead ends (I’ll trim them in winter, after their production gets sucked down thickening trunks on the way in fall) but actually in the way of things that could influence their growth to be less than ideal.
Also all the canopies I opened up huge gaps in in the upper backyard when I first started fixing their structure are filling in this year or next and it looks great, cathedral ceiling with two canopies meeting at the apex, if those trees grew so much since I arrived they were maybe even only 15 years established back then.
Also the black walnut in the lower back regrowing nice and bushy, it’s really still in the stage of getting enough sun for enough growth next year (an adult snapped a few years ago and this is shoots from the cut stump), plenty of legacy roots so it’s not gonna bottleneck on water or nutrients, just let that continue for a few years but keep an eye on developing some leader as a new trunk.
Starting to suspect that the injunction against tree-base mulch piles being right against the trunk is really that the portion of trunk buried in mulch will stop acting like tree, with thick bark keeping outside out, and more like root, creating permeable interface, and that’s fine in its own right but when the mulch rots down and that’s exposed to the open again it invites disease
Huh, there’s a tree that had ventured a branch into a rich vein of sun and had branched really profuse there but Monday we got the hardest rain since its leaves came in and they got wet and weighed down the whole big zone to slightly drooping, and now even dry and undrooped it’s more horizontal, like the experience strained the branch enough for a little cracking.
But then I look at the rest of the tree and I wonder if this might not actually be the usual growth pattern. I know trees incorporate weighing-down into their growth patterns, I have one in the upper backyard that tends to send off shoots awfully vertically but then the second year they bear flowers and the fruit (one of the for-birds soury things we’d probably call “crabapples” if anything) weighs the branches down more horizontal in time for it to get woody and rigid and stay there.
Good yard work day today, was appreciating all the work I’d done to bring it to here, and how much of that was either the old personality’s doing or while I was totally out of my mind and barely able to think ahead. One of the trees fished a branch out into a really rich vein of son and it’s gotten thick and bushy with first spring from-reserves and then from-local growth, so if/when I put on a second story on Karafuto and have to cut one major trunk the tree’s shape’ll still be balanced.
Then did the last of processing twig branches into wood shrapnel, then started to dig a hole to plant all the lavender.
Ah, man, a few trees where over the last few years I had trimmed major branches or multi-trunks and opened up big gaps in the canopy but told myself the adjacent stuff would grow to fill in and this year yeah.
Taking off lower branching also saw to it that root-reserve spring growth was preferentially focused up high, there was one pinnate-leafed one where I found that one branch doesn’t fully block sun and all the parallel ones had been additive, but having thinned them out the remaining ones sent off lateral shoots that are growing to thatch the whole canopy together.
