Avoid the Water Hazards with These Tips

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography

According the National Weather Service, precipitation for March 2010 in Milwaukee was 0.83 inches compared to the normal 2.59 inches. This comes at a time when our landscapes are using a lot of energy to push out leaves, develop flowers, and generally get ready for the summer months ahead. Crawford Tree and Landscape would like to give you some tips on when and how to water, and to offer our continued commitment to keeping your landscapes beautiful.

Wee-hour Watering

Watering the garden after a long day at work can be a chore. We grab the gardening hose (or turn on the irrigation), get the soil wet, (and the leaves) and call it a night. Unfortunately, extended periods of standing water on leaves create a perfect environment for disease. Consider watering early in the morning so the sun can rise and quickly evaporate the fungus-loving habitats from your plants’ foliage.

Go Deep!

Another common mistake is not watering deep enough. Shallow soil moisture encourages shallow roots systems that are susceptible to drought. Instead of watering for a half an hour each morning, consider watering for 2 or 3 hours once a week on established landscapes.

Conserve

Water is a priceless resource that deserves our respect. One of the easiest ways you can conserve water is to pay attention to rainfall. Don’t irrigate immediately before, during, or after a rainstorm. This may seem laughable, but with automated irrigation systems, it’s easy to overlook. Rainfall sensors can fix this problem by turning off scheduled watering times during storms. Install rainfall sensors with your irrigation systems and check them occasionally to make sure they are in working order. By decreasing water use, you may even end up with a lower water bill.

How do you know when it’s time to water? Amongst all of our responsibilities, it is easy to forget when it rained last, which plants can take dry conditions, and so on. Crawford Tree and Landscape can help you there. We know which plants will need supplemental watering during the growing season, what method of irrigation will work for your landscape, and how to ensure a healthy green season. Correct watering practices are essential for a healthy landscape, so let’s work together to ensure that your plants have everything they need.

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography

 

How To Deal with Salt and Salt Damage

Salt Hitting the Pavement by the Ton

Salt does a great job melting ice and snow to keep pavement safe. The unfortunate twist is that the same chemistry breaking down ice has a destructive impact on our plants. So the question is, how can we keep surfaces ice-free without sacrificing the landscape?

What does salt do?

1. Salt is naturally occurring, in the world around us and in our bodies.
2. Salt makes snow and ice melt and colder temperatures, but it also absorbs moisture powerfully, even pulling it out of plant tissue.
3. When poured down all winter for ice control, it moves from pavement to the soil where it displaces nutrients necessary for plant life.

Sunlight on the Snow

What can you do to address salt damage and – ideally – prevent it from happening?

1. Review winter salt usage. Apply enough to melt ice without leaving a residue and limit where you apply it.
2. Though more expensive, consider salt alternatives like calcium chloride or magnesium chloride that melt more effectively without applying as much.
3. Flush salt-saturated soil in the spring and provide plenty of water for salt-stressed plants to compensate for their desiccation, or water loss. While irrigating, be sure the soil is well-drained to carry away the salt.
4. If there is a concentrated salt spill, gypsum can help neutralize it and allow a dead spot in your turf, for example, to recover quickly.
5. Plant salt-tolerant species in areas adjacent to salted surfaces. In addition, pile salt-soaked slush away from plants during the winter.
6. Protect plants, particularly evergreens like arborvitae, from salt and salt spray with physical barriers like burlap. Addressing other stress factors too will help your landscape deal with all kinds of damaging factors that come their way.

You can read more in an excellent release (PDF) by the Tree Care Industry Association, the organization that established the accreditation guidelines we follow. In our own snow services, we strive to limit plant damage because it’s best for the landscapes we serve year round.

Snowy Branches in River Hills

 

The Clock Ticks for Oak Pruning

Red Oak Trees in Delavan

In Wisconsin, oak trees are at risk of infection by a deadly disease, oak wilt. It gets transmitted by beetles that carry fungal spores from tree to tree. These spores move inside the tree through openings and infect the vascular system of the tree, the part that moves water and nutrients. Unfortunately, pruning cuts create openings that are perfect for this fungus. If we want to care for trees through pruning, it’s important that the timing is appropriate.

A key rule of thumb is to avoid pruning from April to July in Wisconsin, according to the Wisconsin DNR. In fact, the best time to prune is now – during the dormant season before April. The trees won’t lose the water, nutrients, and food stores in the leaves that would be lost while pruning in the summer. Plus, dormant pruning can take advantage of frozen ground and a clear view of the tree’s structure.

Oak wilt is a continuing challenge for arborists. We have a limited set of options for controlling the disease, much like Dutch Elm Disease, and encourage following best practices, like pruning oaks when dormant, as a simple way to control the oak wilt.

Injecting a Deeply Planted Red Oak with Alamo

Let’s quickly highlight oak wilt controls that our company provides:

• Don’t prune oaks between April and July.
• Remove diseased oaks immediately to reduce the risk to neighboring trees.
• Severe roots from diseased trees that may be grafted to healthy trees.
• Inject with Alamo to protect the tree’s vessels from infection.
• Plant a diverse variety of species so one disease impacts only part of your tree population.

We love our oak trees and hope you do too! For more information, you can read the USDA Forest Service’s thorough article on oak wilt. In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin DNR offers more local information you might find helpful.

Let’s work together to keep our beautiful oak trees from being distant memories.

Oak Wilt Victim

Photo by phigits.

 

Our Snow & Ice Services

A Direction You Want to Avoid

In Wisconsin, we get plenty of winter weather that serves as a badge of honor or a burden. At our company, snow provides us with another service opportunity.

• Snow plowing: our plowing customers are clustered into dense routes, often working for neighbor after neighbor. While our service area is more limited, our response times are excellent.
  • Residential: we pair up a driver with a shoveler to take care of the driveway, walks, sidewalks, patios, etc. all together. Many of our snow plowing customers date back 15-20 years and keep returning because of our value and quality of service.
  • Commercial: the bigger trucks in our fleet appear as the snow begins falling to keep commercial clients open for business and minimize the potential for liability. Separate snow blowing and shoveling crews work quickly to open sidewalks and keep customers in compliance with the city requirements for clear sidewalks.
• 

  If snow never fell on pavement...

  Salting: for light snows and following up after plowings, our salt crews work to apply enough salt to keep surfaces safe. You can count on us to be responsive and attentive to your needs.

• Snow removal and hauling: some properties have very limited space for storing snow on-site, necessitating snow hauling or simply moving it around on-site. We frequently work around schedules to move snow during the day (for apartments) or at night (for offices, etc), whenever the parking lot is not being used. Even private driveways can get buried in snow, making it difficult to see or store additional snow.
• Roof and gutter snow and ice: severe damage occurs when snow melts on a roof and forms ice dams that can easily spread under shingles. By removing snow on a regular basis and melting the ice with calcium chloride, which is safer on metal and melts more effectively than rock salt, we can spare your roof from leaks and permanent damage. Many times this is a temporary solution to prevent further problems until the roof and gutters can be repaired in the summer.

We hope you enjoyed a mini-tour of our snow services!

 

Thank You and Farewell to Cynthia Mills

We would like to express our thanks to Cynthia Mills for her service to our industry and wish her the best of luck as she leaves her post as President and CEO of the Tree Care Industry Association. She brings a warm welcome and a smile as the face of our industry while overseeing a major restructuring of the organization that serves it.

Over her tenure, the TCIA changed its name (from National Arborist Association), redesigned virtually every publication, and created the first accreditation standard for tree care companies. This standard has grown to become a new baseline for companies to meet and exceed and stands to be one of the most powerful impacts.  It certainly was not developed and implemented by her, but Cynthia’s oversight and guidance of TCIA during that time helped make it possible and effective.

Her presence will be missed, but we are excited for the future as one door closes and another opens.

 

Cut The Green & Leave The Brown – Really?

It’s a strange phenomenon, but in Milwaukee, we see folks cutting green grass so short that the lawn looks brown afterwards. The little bit of green grass struggling in the summer heat and drought gets clipped off for no reason! The problem is a mentality of it’s that day of the week, and we always cut the grass regardless. This attitude completely ignores a number of factors.

Here are some key things to consider about mowing:

1. In temperate regions like Wisconsin, we grow cool-season grasses like Kentucky bluegrass that thrive in cool weather like the spring and fall but suffer in the summer heat. The turf is very resilient during moderate temperatures, but during stressful periods, you have to change your approach.
2. In the spring and fall, it’s best to cut the grass a little shorter so it grows thicker instead of longer and naturally crowds out weeds. In the summer, let the grass grow longer so it shades and cools itself. Take a look at this excellent article from the Aurora News-Register of Nebraska.
3. Serious damage can occur if you “cut the green & leave the brown” during the summer. This article from the University of Kentucky’s turf specialist, AJ Powell, Jr. lays out the facts, saying “weeds will greatly increase and severe turf kill may occur” if you cut too much off in the summer. The green part is what is producing the food for the rest of the grass plant so cutting that off is detrimental. Some get in a routine of mowing each week without raising the mower deck in the hot and dry periods and unknowingly do damage.

Bottom line: Don’t stress your lawn by cutting the green and leaving the brown. Mow longer (3 to 4+ inches) during summer heat and drought, and mow shorter (2 1/2 to 3 inches) in the spring and fall to thicken the turf.

What kinds of crazy things do you see people doing with their lawns?

 

From Downpours to Droughts

USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor

Watch for the switch! The Milwaukee area has a consistent climate of wet springs and dry summers that leads to incubates fungal problems and mosquitoes in the spring and drought damage in the summer as the mercury rises. This spring’s showers stretched on much longer than what we’ve seen in years past and helped rebuild a water backlog. The moisture and frequent rains make it possible for fungi that rely on water to transport spores to infect more leaves on plants and make it challenging for us to find dry days to apply protective fungicide sprays.

Mosquitoes benefit from the rains too, laying eggs in puddles of standing water everywhere.  This year, we are continuing our hugely successful mosquito sprays in response to the customer feedback we’ve received. Most customers have reported immediate results and virtually mosquito-free backyards for up to 30 days.

Watching for the Drought

Here in Milwaukee, though, the rains can dry up just as quickly as they appeared. It’s critical to watch drought-sensitive plants such as annuals and turf that will wilt and dry out after just a couple of days without rain. Mature trees are also impacted but are slower to show signs of stress. Before your trees start to decline, be sure that your landscape is receiving approximately and inch of water via rain or watering per week. If you need any help with watering, our landscape maintenance crews are happy to set up sprinklers, water by hand, or bring water by the truckload.

Milwaukee Precipitation Running  Surplus/Deficit

From the National Weather Service’s climate records for Milwaukee.

Milwaukee Precipitation Running Surplus/Deficit

The graph illustrates how Milwaukee was consistently deficient 10-12 inches of precipitation from 2005-2007 but has caught up easily in the last two years. While this has little or no impact on irrigated properties or annual plants, mature trees and forests are profoundly impacted by the availability of water from precipitation.

 

Enjoy Your 4th of July!

Happy 4th of July! Our crews worked hard this spring and summer to make properties look their best today. We hope you have a fun and safe holiday this weekend.

Photo from Juneau Park on the Milwaukee lakefront of the Solomon Juneau statue.

 

Gorgeous Glendale Patio

Our crew just finished a patio project in Glendale, WI. The property has a great view but needed a functional and attractive living space in the backyard. By once again teaming up with an excellent carpenter, the customer is thrilled to have a large outdoor patio with filtered sunlight and a surrounding landscape that complements the entire project.

 

Welcome to Our New Web Presence!

Today marks the launch of our new website and a new way of connecting with our clients. Instead of the static “business card” web page before, this new site allows us to more quickly and easily post new items and to receive comments from our visitors. We hope you’ll find it engaging.