If you are like me, you may have wondered why it’s so important to keep trees trimmed properly. In my upbringing, we really didn’t pay that much attention to trimming our trees - we let them take nature’s course. And I guess that worked out alright for a country boy who grew up around the Lake of the Ozarks area. I surely enjoyed climbing many a tree, and we burned firewood as our main source of heat, but it wasn’t until I moved to the Springfield, Missouri area that I gained a real appreciation for what a properly trimmed tree can look like.
When you live in the city, it becomes especially important because trees grow amongst houses and over fences and sheds (and sometimes power lines). But there is something really satisfying about looking at a tree that has been cared for its entire lifespan, from sapling to aged tree. If you have the luxury of starting young with your trees, by all means do. You can form the health and shape of your trees, preparing them for a long and beautiful life. In dollars and cents, what that means for you is fewer tree removal and trimming bills, and higher property valuation.
If you have mature trees on your property and you aren’t already trimming them on a regular basis, you probably already had the vague impression in the back of your mind that they need to be pruned. In fact, that’s most definitely why you are reading this article. Depending on how ambitious you are and how many trees you have, you may be doing a little of the work yourself. But pruning does not mean grabbing a saw and cutting branches off willy-nilly, at somewhat random angles and locations. Here is a good training video on how to properly prune your trees if you are one of the ambitious ones:
Keep in mind that different kinds of trees prefer to be trimmed and different times of the year, although it is risky for the health of the tree to trim them when they are just budding in the spring until they have fully leafed out. However, there are a number of reasons why you may need to do that in the spring in Missouri, with our heavy storms and storm damage.