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Warning: my old boss said topping trees was fine and I believed him for 3 seasons
Back when I was starting out doing residential work around Dayton, the guy I worked under taught me that topping a big maple was just how you handled one that was getting too tall for the yard. He had me doing it on probably 20 trees over 3 seasons and never once said a word about it being bad for them. Then last month I took a chainsaw safety class through the state extension office and the instructor pulled up a study from the ISA showing that topped trees send out those weak water sprouts that snap off in storms way more often, like the failure rate jumps a crazy amount compared to a proper reduction cut. I went back and looked at a silver maple we topped on a job two years ago and sure enough, the whole crown is nothing but skinny vertical shoots now. What got me was the instructor saying you can actually kill a tree outright by starving it, since taking that much leaf surface off cuts off how it makes food. I felt dumb standing there but also kind of mad I trusted a guy who had been doing it 25 years. Anyone else get taught stuff early on that turned out to be flat out bad advice, and how did you un-learn it?
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charlieh7426d ago
Feels bad to find out you were doing damage for years just because you trusted the guy training you, and I get the mad part more than the dumb part. That 25 years of experience means nothing if he never once checked whether the work was actually good for the tree. Happens to a lot of us starting out, and the fact you went and looked at that silver maple yourself says you're already doing better than he ever did.
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