We have a huge, 80 year old sycamore tree in our back yard. Over the winter we noticed a lot of smallish branches and twigs falling from the tree. We weren't sure what to think, we've never owned a tree before! In the spring, there were very few leaves and they all fell off after a few weeks, along with even more small branches and leaves. It re-leaved a month later and looks okay, but we knew something had to be wrong with it.
We called an arborist (tree doctor) and they came out, said our tree had some type of desease (I looked it up on the internet and the symptoms matched, so we knew weren't being jerked around). They recomended that they prune it, give it an injection to cure the disease, and then fertilize it in the fall. Plus they want to inject it again next spring, aparently it's been sick for a few years and they don't think 1 injection will clear it up.
So, they pruned it and did the injection. $250 for the pruning (it did really need it, especially after that huge branch broke off during the wind storm last month) and $450 for the injection. I think the fertelizing will be another $200 or so.
Expensive, but much cheaper than having the tree die and paying $3000 to $4000 to have it removed (or worse, fall over onto our garage or the neighbors house!). Plus, it's an 80 year old tree, we don't WANT to cut it down, even if it had turned out to be cheaper to do so.
Someone remind me again why I wanted to move to a single family home? I didn't have to deal with this stuff when I owned my condo!
It's not easy being green.
August 14th, 2006 at 01:57 pm
August 14th, 2006 at 02:15 pm 1155564901
I hope all the work (and money) brings your tree back to it's full glory!
August 16th, 2006 at 03:31 pm 1155742297
August 16th, 2006 at 05:23 pm 1155749039
But I bet that big, mature tree really is beautiful. I'm in a new development, so all we have are twigs of various sizes!