After the brutal winter storm we had earlier this year with record-breaking temperatures below freezing for an extended amount of time, you may have noticed several trees around College Station with bare branches during a season in which they would normally be thriving and covered with leaves. Some of these trees will even have new, short branches with little leafy sprouts coming off of their trunks while nothing is growing off of the big, established branches. 

These new, little branches are called tree suckers because they zap water and nutrients from the main tree. Tree suckers are a tree’s attempt to grow more branches in response to grafts, stress, drought, or some kind of injury, like the freeze we had in February. Some trees will not survive the damage done to them during the winter storm so they are shooting up tree suckers in a final attempt to multiply and make sure the tree’s lineage carries on. Sometimes tree suckers can be removed very easily, you can pull them off with your hand, and sometimes they need to be pruned if they been growing long enough to have a thickened base that will require cutting in order to be removed. 

If you want to do your own tree trimming to clean up the tree suckers, be sure to carefully use sharp tools so you can make a very clean cut as close to the trunk as possible, but be mindful not to cut into the trunk of the tree. You can use handheld pruning sheers for trimming tree suckers that are easily within reach or long-handled sheers for any trimming that needs to be done higher up on your trees. 

If your tree care requires using climbing aids like step stools and ladders in order to get the job done, make sure to take the proper safety precautions in order to prevent falling while trimming your trees. Each year there are more than 164,000 ladder injuries treated in emergency rooms across the United States and 300 deaths caused by falling from ladders. Most ladder deaths are caused by falls of 10 feet or less. We don’t want anyone in our community to be a part of that statistic. 

If you aren’t sure whether your trees need to be trimmed or you aren’t comfortable doing it yourself, it’s always best to have a local certified arborist take a look at them before any trimming is done to avoid causing damage to the trees.  It is important to get sick, dying, and dead trees in your yard identified and taken care of before they cause damage to anyone’s property. 

Top Point Tree takes College Station tree care very seriously and we only want what is best for each tree. If you think your trees may need some help, we will be happy to come to take a look at them. We will walk you through what we find and recommend a plan of action based on what each individual tree needs. We hope these tips are helpful and we look forward to serving College Stations’s tree care needs.