2 Reasons Not To Do Your Own Tree Pruning
Here are two reasons why you should not do your own tree pruning and should instead get your trees pruned by a tree care business.
To ensure that any diseased sections of the trees are pruned correctly
If you know that one or more of the trees on your land have some early signs of infection, and you want to prune them to remove the diseased sections so that the affected trees will survive, you must have this pruning work done professionally. The reason for this is that if you are careless when pruning these diseased sections, you might cause the infection to reach other parts of the trees, which could eventually lead to you having to get your trees felled.
For example, if after you've finished pruning off a tree's diseased branch, you forget to disinfect your pruning tools before you begin pruning the healthy sections of the tree, your pruning tools might transmit the disease-carrying bacteria or viruses that got on them when you cut the infected branch, onto these healthy areas of the tree. This might then result in the whole tree getting infected and having to be removed.
Conversely, a trained arborist will not only always remember to disinfect their tools after they've used them to prune any diseased branches, but will also disinfect them properly; they won't, for example, miss any of the indentations on the teeth of their pruning saw when cleaning it. This in turn means that you won't need to be concerned about the tree pruning making your infected trees even more unhealthy. Instead, the infected branches will be carefully pruned and the trees will have a better chance of survival.
To ensure the pruning makes the trees look more appealing
Another reason why DIY tree pruning is usually inadvisable is that you might make your trees look less visually appealing. Whilst some of the most common reasons why people have their trees pruned are to keep them healthy and to ensure that any dead branches or branches growing too close to buildings or power lines are removed, pruning is also an excellent way to make a tree look better. When an arborist does this task, they can make a tree's branches look more uniform in length and can even out sections of a disproportionate tree, giving the tree a more balanced-looking appearance.
If you do your own tree pruning and don't have an artistic eye, you might end up making a mess, by cutting some branches far too short or not pruning the extremely long ones enough. This could give your trees an unattractive, misshapen look. If you cut many of the branches too short, you wouldn't be able to fix this and would just have to wait for the tree to regrow. As such, if the aesthetics of your outdoor space and its trees matter to you, you should have a tree care business handle the pruning for you.
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