Winter is a time for your trees to enter a dormant state, slowing their growth and storing nutrients as they wait out the cold weather. There’s a lot that you can do to help them and ensure that they survive the winter, leading to better health in the spring and summer.
How to Help Your Trees Thrive During Winter Dormancy
1. Prune in Winter
Winter tree care is very important to the overall lifespan of your tree, and proper pruning can mean the difference between a healthy tree and an ailing one come spring. Late fall and early winter are prime seasons for pruning deciduous trees and bushes because of their dormancy. Since trees aren’t committing their water and nutrition to growing leaves or new branches, they can heal from wounds more quickly. Pruning is proactive and the right thing to do to prevent disease when you see a dying limb or branch, but there are right ways and wrong ways to prune a tree. Improper cuts can actually prevent the tree from properly healing. It’s easy to cut too much or too little from a dead limb, leaving the tree worse off than if you did nothing. Pruning right before a frost can leave the inside of the tree exposed to lower temperatures, meaning that the timing needs to be just right.
Additionally, specialized tools are necessary for removing branches and limbs for the safety of your property (and you!). Pruning is best left to professional arborists for these reasons, and if you’re looking for Nashville tree care, you can count on The Parke Company. We’ve serviced central Tennessee for decades, and our expertise means your trees will be in good hands.
2. Mulch to Protect
Mulching in the fall is a great way to ensure that your plants are protected from freezing temperatures at the root level. A few inches of mulch around the perimeter of a tree trunk or in a garden bed can keep ground temperatures above freezing, which can save the tree from permanent damage. While many trees native to Tennessee are hardy, not all of them can survive in frozen ground for prolonged periods. While we aren’t always getting the coldest winters down here, it’s always possible, and cold weather is certainly in everyone’s memory. Last January saw a three-day dip into freezing temps that had many of us caught off guard by high snowfall and blustery winds. Without mulch during a cold snap like this, the roots of many trees are at risk of damage. While these arctic cold snaps aren’t super common in the South, they can still happen and cause lasting harm to trees. One of the best winter tree care tips is to use the wood from your yearly pruning to produce mulch that you can then use to protect the roots of younger or smaller trees and bushes. This is a service that we offer at The Parke Company, and it’s actually beneficial for us all. We don’t need to haul away your wood, and you get natural mulch to regulate the temperature of your soil.
3. Wrap Trees and Shrubs
Plastic tree guards are a great way to help keep saplings and small trees and bushes safe in the winter. Wraps on tree trunks are great for preventing pest damage from foraging wildlife looking for food when resources are scarce. Since deer, squirrels, mice, and other small mammals can get some nutrition from your trees’ bark, your yard can quickly become a buffet if things get desperate. The damage from grazing animals can be fairly extensive and can kill the tree outright. Even if the nibbles aren’t too much, the wounds they cause can let pests gain access to the tree more easily, causing you more issues in the spring from termites and other insects.
Another benefit of wrapping the trunks of smaller or newer trees is to prevent what’s called sunscald. Sunscald is a type of sun damage that saplings are especially susceptible to. Sunscald can also impact trees with thin bark, like maples and cherries. Essentially, sunscald is the result of a tree warming in the sunlight enough to stimulate growth, then losing the light due to more clouds and less daylight. When this active bark is exposed to the cold, it’s not prepared and can die, leading to the appearance of sunken, dried, and cracked bark and dead spots on the tree. A great tree care method to prevent this is by wrapping the trees’ trunks in white protective plastic. This helps to reflect the light and keep the bark from becoming too warm.
4. Keep Watering
How do you keep trees from dying in the winter? One of the best ways to make sure your trees survive the cold is to ensure they’re properly hydrated. Even in Nashville, where many of our winters are wet, trees can still go through dry spells that can harm them. Since all of a tree’s resources are committed to survival, they still need a good amount of water, and steadily, all winter long. There are a few methods for properly watering during the winter, but the cold weather does make some traditional watering methods difficult. Irrigation systems should be shut down, even with the mild winters we usually experience. This is because even one night of freezing temperatures can cause damage to the pipes when the water in them freezes, leading to costly repairs in the spring. Instead, rely on watering with a soaker hose or using other popular gardening tools, like a tree watering ring. Soaker hose systems are essentially above-ground irrigation systems that constantly move small amounts of water to multiple areas of your garden or landscaping.
Trees don’t need as much water in the winter, so giving them a few hours of slow watering a week should suffice. If a freeze is coming, bring your hose in, or make sure it’s fully drained of water to prevent damage to the nozzles and couplings. If you’re unsure of what a tree watering ring is, don’t worry. These are products that circle the trunk of a tree and are full of absorbent materials that soak up water and slowly dispense it right to the roots of the tree. In addition to providing your trees with a steady water supply, they can also insulate the ground near a tree, protecting the roots from frost.
Don’t Fear the Winter
This winter, ensure your trees are properly cared for and ready for the cold that most certainly will come for at least a short while. If you need help tackling your winter prep lawn care, give the experts at The Parke Company a call today.
