Wed, 27 May 2009

Tree surgery
Yestuday I preformed surgery on a small lemon tree with my friend Rebekah who is also a pro gardener. She works with me every week for one of my customers who has a large yard. This customer of mine has many citrus trees, including one Meyer Lemon that has been dropping some leaves lately. we realized that the trunk of the tree was being choked by one of its own roots. the root and the trunk grew really fast in the last couple months, and before we knew it the root was bigger than the trunk and was encircling the trunk and strangling it. this is common with trees grown in containers, especially fruit trees that are grafted like meyer lemons. Basically we carefully chipped away at the root until we cleared it away from the trunk. We used pruners, lopers and a pruning saw to very carefully gouge out parts of the root. we took extra care to not hit the trunk with any tools to avoid injuring the trunk. We could tell the trunk had been squeezed- a problem that experts call 'girdleing'. In the process we had to trim off a few other large roots, and we were sqeemish about injuring the tree too much. but we figured the tree would certainly die if we didn't do anything. We shall see how the tree comes out of it. I think it will be ok.

posted at: 10:28 | path: /colleen2009 | link for this entry

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