Recent content by Mossy Dell

  1. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    Thanks, oceans. I was able to find the article in ISA Arborist labeled Conservation Arboriculture and titles "Learning From Old Trees, Artists, & Dead Poets" that discusses and pictures the Clough Oak. The photographic history shown is remarkable, even hard to accept, in that the tree changed...
  2. Mossy Dell

    Strangler fig eats a Southern live oak

    I've just returned from Florida, and the most interesting thing I saw, and ALMOST the most upsetting, was a Strangler fig devouring a large live oak tree. It was in Melbourne Beach, a couple of beach towns south of where I grew up. Walking through a remnant woods on the east side of the Indian...
  3. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    I'd plant black locusts too if they weren't such a short-lived succession tree everywhere I've lived. I believe it's a beetle that causes so many to decline. But the ones that persist are craggy trees with a lot of character, including many holes for bluebird nests. I read our native black...
  4. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    This pin oak is more typical of my pruning. Planted at the same time as the locust, the only branches removed so far are 1-2 multiple leaders that shoot out annually. Of course any arborist looking at it will notice I have reduced or headed the lower branches as well. I have pruned it this year...
  5. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    treebing, I've seen some big locusts in woods in Ohio. But it's possible they were there and then the woods regrew when cropland or pasture was abandoned. When I walk past a certain woods almost daily I look at a monster white oak and wonder about its history. I reckon that woods has been cut...
  6. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    I agree with you on nurseries and thank you for the kind word. On the one hand, it is an incredible gift that we can pot trees and keep them for extended periods that way, ship them, mail them, throw them in the back of pickups. On the other, nurseries prune almost always only for sales, and...
  7. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    Oh, Dan! It does take all of us to make the world go round. I know other locust haters. But honeylocusts were among a handful of "northern trees," as I thought of them, I first learned and loved. Coming to Ohio and then Indiana from a Florida beach town in my mid 20s, I undertook a crash course...
  8. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    You've encapsulated my belief. Lawns were not the evolutionary environment of almost all trees. In the forest they are generally forced to grow tall by competition, lose lower branches to shade, and gain protection from wind from other trees. Trees truly go wild in domestication! They gorge on...
  9. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    Tom I got burned using duct tape on a leader splint in a much smaller locust in my back yard last year. When I removed it, the tape took a bit of surface bark. Probably not a serious injury, but as it was on the south side of the trunk I painted it with dilute interior latex paint last fall...
  10. Mossy Dell

    Pruner's Remorse: a tale of my Honeylocust

    Having some pruner’s remorse over this tree, Locust 1— This Imperial honeylocust was planted in front of my house as a 6’ containerized whip in late fall of 2018. It’s now almost 20’ going into its fifth growing season. I pruned it very little until this go-round. Last week, I reduced or...
  11. Mossy Dell

    Heading vs Reduction Cuts on Temporary Branches on Young Trees?

    Yes . . . Don't think I'd survive the bleakness of winter in NW Ohio. We are in a small town 20 minutes from Blacksburg. VA TECH is a great school. I teach retirees personal nonfiction writing there once a year in their Lifelong Learning Institute.
  12. Mossy Dell

    Heading vs Reduction Cuts on Temporary Branches on Young Trees?

    Thanks, ATH. I had decided it doesn't matter, either would be fine. But as you note: not necessarily! I know heaps more theory than I ever have. And it helps me, until I actually go out to prune. By the way, I know Findlay. My wife's family, the Krendls, are from Spencerville and are all over...
  13. Mossy Dell

    Heading vs Reduction Cuts on Temporary Branches on Young Trees?

    Thanks, Stumpsprouts. Makes sense.
  14. Mossy Dell

    Heading vs Reduction Cuts on Temporary Branches on Young Trees?

    Here is an example of what perplexes me in pruning. Today I trimmed this little Saijo persimmon behind my barn. I am letting it develop some low scaffold branches and will select for some higher on the tree. See the branch on the left: I want to turn the low, lateral shoot into that branch's...
  15. Mossy Dell

    Service Dogs/Managing Disability

    Brando, what breed or cross is your dog? I love Labs but imagine they’d be too big.
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