Do we really need to deadwood????

great thread. one thing to consider. if you say something is dangerous, and therefor you should walk fast under it to reduce your exposure. this would be a effective way to mitigate exposure. but it also unfortunately is proof that who ever is in charge of the place knows there is a danger, and if something happened that may come up in court. I agree outside of litigation. I like the idea of "look up and decide how you want to proceed" personally I think the whole world should operate like this. but I mean the reality is a big part of what we get paid for is to make trees idiot proof.

We live in a world where idiot proof is the expectation, ..... and if a idiot gets hurt, that means someone must have not done their job.

I think I'm gonna massage that into something I can put on a tee shirt.

but when I take care of my personal trees, I leave stubs on purpose. and every year I try and bust them off, eventually they are ready and they break out. and the remaining hole,,, ( I hesitate to use the term wound here because it is not really a wound ) closes up really fast and clean...

if you leave a stub and forget about it, thats a real problem because there is now no branch/weight /leverage. to bust it out of the socket in the wind. I do this for both dead and live limb removals and I have found it to work great. also its interesting if you leave too much of a stub it won't die, but too little and the decay will reach the main stem before it falls off. where I feel I am a success is when the stub promptly dies, then I get it removed before the decay enters the socket.
 
I've seen some great examples of pruning limiting decay. I removed a red oak limb with a sealed 4" wound on it. I took the chunk with the sealed wound, which had been pruned a few years before , and split it. Inside there was decay in the first 2" of where the stub was. It was clear that removing the dead limb allowed the wound to seal sooner and limit the spread of the decay. This is an important aspect of deadwooding as much as other factors brought up.
 
Great thread guys.
If I'm pruning street trees i will do "correct" collar cuts but if I'm in the woods (yes in germany we deadwood in the woods) or in specific places that i feel will benefit from having more habitat i will leave stubs and might even do the odd coronet cut.
Im very interested if anyone has heard of a serious injury due to falling deadwood?
 
colemanjessenz said:
Great thread guys.
If I'm pruning street trees i will do "correct" collar cuts but if I'm in the woods (yes in germany we deadwood in the woods) or in specific places that i feel will benefit from having more habitat i will leave stubs and might even do the odd coronet cut.
Im very interested if anyone has heard of a serious injury due to falling deadwood?
Click to expand...

I believe I read a short story in the newspaper or online about a fatality in New York city's Central Park. A person who was just walking through the park was struck on the head and killed by a fairly large falling branch. If I recall correctly. This would have been within the last 5 or 10 years, I think.

Tim
 
colemanjessenz said:
Great thread guys.
If I'm pruning street trees i will do "correct" collar cuts but if I'm in the woods (yes in germany we deadwood in the woods) or in specific places that i feel will benefit from having more habitat i will leave stubs and might even do the odd coronet cut.
Im very interested if anyone has heard of a serious injury due to falling deadwood?
Click to expand...
Deadwooding in the woods is my ideal
job description!
 
Yes deadwood over path should go, but the pic seems to show those big ones over the natural area. Great collars on these, so retaining them might not hurt the tree.

"My gut tells me this theory is going to be dis-proven in the future.My thought...... aggressive healing of wounds is not the normal way trees heal."
?Should we assume that we really know what is normal? Why distrust that healthy and rapid growth? Read the new CODIT book!

"I know there have been studies showing this to be true and I don't doubt them. " &So your brain is not in agreement with your gut. Which organ can we trust the most?

"Look at the large dead limb above in the first picture. How tempting is it to cut right next to that wonderful response growth, and let the tree cover that over. Just as tempting as it is for me to pick my scabs and I have been told that leaves a scar and is not as good as letting the wound heal naturally."
&This analogy blows out over the fact that human scar tissue is response growth, our 'collar' on the move. Tree collars can also move. Pruning deadwood retains collars.

" Lets work more to move targets, reduce occupancy rate and retain trees in their natural state. We are working with large cranes a lot. Lets just move the house instead of removing the tree."
Let's work more on tree care, our expertise. Good to keep an open mind on mitigation, but it's gotta be reasonable. Managing external targets has many limits. Managing the #1 target, the tree, provides meaningful mitigation.
 
colemanjessenz said:
Thanks mate, awful tragedy that is . I only briefly skimmed through , am I right in assuming that that branch was alive at the time of failure ? It said something about a freak accident ? . I'm more specifically wondering about deadwood though.
Click to expand...

The point of the link I posted was that there have been multiple incidents in which people have been hurt or killed by falling limbs, just in this one park alone. I would not assume that the branches that fell were alive; If I were going to make an assumption, it would be in the other direction. My guess is that the limbs that were marked for removal were likely marked as such because they were dead and fairly large, and therefore viewed as a hazard. They just did not get to them in time to prevent the incidents. All of this is just speculation on my part, as the articles never get specific as to the condition of the branches that caused the injuries or fatalities, at least that I've seen.

That's all I have for now.

Tim
 
JontreeHI said:
And that deadwood isn't going to fall out either, it's so strong and flexible. I can get behind the kick test or throw line test. This of course doesn't account for pathogen entry into live wood
Click to expand...

While I hear what you are saying here. I don't know if I can agree with what you are saying.

1. Find some deadwood and set a throwline choked on the limb lets say 1/2 way out.

2. that piece of deadwood may stay firm and dig the throwline in to your hands.

3. But it's dead so leave the line there and return every 6 months and give it a tug eventually it'll fail and come down. Maybe after 6 months maybe after 6 years. But I have found that you can only trust deadwood to be atlas somewhat untrustworthy. Don't bet your life or limb on it.

That's my 2 cents anyways.
 
TimBr said:
The point of the link I posted was that there have been multiple incidents in which people have been hurt or killed by falling limbs, just in this one park alone. I would not assume that the branches that fell were alive; If I were going to make an assumption, it would be in the other direction. My guess is that the limbs that were marked for removal were likely marked as such because they were dead and fairly large, and therefore viewed as a hazard. They just did not get to them in time to prevent the incidents. All of this is just speculation on my part, as the articles never get specific as to the condition of the branches that caused the injuries or fatalities, at least that I've seen.

That's all I have for now.

Tim
Click to expand...
Cheers man , I didn't read the top article until just now . @JontreeHI it's great work , we deadwood paths so most of the time just traverse along cutting back the larger deadwood, sometimes you can get away with not starting a saw up for half a day .
 
Question...when speaking about CODIT, Dr. Shigo said that "walls 1,2,&3 are model terms. They are not biological features." Can someone elaborate on that? I would have thought that "it is or it isn't." So I'm not getting it. Anyways it's out of the modern Arboriculture book by him.
 
Good question from JoshR. This speaks to the difference, and it is real, between compartmentalization (how trees grow and defend themselves) and CODIT (a simplified model of compartmentalization). Many of our European friends confuse the two...and some in the states do too. To be fair, some folks do understand the distinction but continue to use CODIT as the term is familiar. OK by me, I guess, but regrettable. I touch on that confusion in an older article of mine: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/8529 (yes, it is a terrible title). Most of my research work involves compartmentalization in one way or another, e.g. http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/50477 and http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/47727. I don't much deal with CODIT at all, except for historical interest.
And don't take my word for it either. Check out the two summaries that Alex Shigo wrote, admittedly for a somewhat technical readership, I've attached them. At the risk of me sounding like a real jerk, if you still have questions after a close reading of the attached and the citations above, let's start a new thread, although much of the issues were likely hashed out in archived discussions!
Also, some folks have had trouble downloading to phones and tablets from the Forest Service sites. I don't know why or how that would be. Before giving up, try using a regular full-service laptop or desktop machine. Or hunt around, folks have posted most or all of these in different places in the ether.
 

Attachments

Instead of making a proper cut.

What if we left a modified stub. Allowing for some decay to occur at a distance once the decay has reduced the length over time the callouse has met that point and the wound closes.

Say you are pruning a 3" diameter live branch.
Leave a stub 3" from the proper place to make the cut. Take (at least)three more cuts at an angle to the center/end of the stub. Basically sharpen the short stub.

Through my own observations. Seems like some trees self prune and heal rather well. Around me Red oaks do just fine, for the most part, with regards to dead wood not really causing cavities. I wonder about the affects of environmental "conditions" with respect to the seasonal norms and extremes of temperatures, precipitation, winds, humidity, light hours per day and so on. Maybe the "conditions" exist in one place for a tree to self prune and heal quickly and maybe that same genetic tree would not do as well in another place, and be prone to excessive decay due to the "conditions " there promoting rapid decay.
 
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