Root Remediation

Frax

Frax

Participating member
Location
Expat now in Chapel Hill, NC by way of Calgary, Al
I haven't contributed for awhile but I'm still alive. Adjusting to life in 'de souf'. Now down to business.

I know this has been covered from time to time, but I'd like your thoughts.

Sixty 10 year old maples at a condo in reasonably good health are planted too shallowly (at least that's a change from the usual too deep)and covered with dirt/mulch. Apparently the soil was too dense to get them at proper grade.

Poor stock like usual for condos and obviously girdling roots in some cases.

The condo association wants to fix whatever can be fixed. We plan on careful digging and probing to get any excess soil or mulch off, but a mass of adventitious roots has matted over the whole mess in many cases.

Also, on cutting girdling roots around the trunk that are already over an inch in diameter. Would you cut? Where?

They seem to be coping, but I know that trees can give up quite suddenly from bad root development.

Should have taken a picture. Possibly will be able to get one soon.
 
I cut girdlers where I don't damage the cambium of the tree. Sometimes it means just using a chisel to chop away part of the girdler. Getting them as close to the origniation point seems to reduce any resprouting/hydra effects.

Adventitious...cut as many as possible at the origination point.
 
On young trees I cut girdling roots very hard. I'd rather have a tree die quickly now and get replaced with a good tree than to have a tree that should've lived 50 years only live 20 years.
 
Hey Nora, glad to see/hear you again ay. Thought you might be pissed at us. Also glad to see you are picking up the eubonics of the area. Chip should be able to interpret when you really need it. Sounds like you have the typical red maple with volcano mulch, and I'll bet a boatload of scale too. Air Knife or Spade would do wonders clearing out the debris and exposing the girdling roots. If you can"t beg or borrow one, let me know. I might be able to help out.
 
Never pissed off on TB. Just getting some kind of routine back. It was a big shift making this move.

Chip has experience with root remediation work, but its new to me. Trees recover faster and grow faster here by far, but are also prone to more diseases and fungal infections. So, lots to learn. Sharp chisels and probes and a keen eye should go far with this.

Thanks for the input.
 
Also, a keyhole saw that is used for sheetrock cutting seems to stand up to dirt/sand/abrasion much better than a pruning saw and are much cheaper. I also like using a blower to expose loose soil so you can really find out whats going on. Air spading is obviously much more efficient, small scale I have had decent results using a pancake air compressor. Soil moisture conditions need to be just right. AND you gotta have a decently amped power source with appropriate extension cable, or your just end up popping breakers. I really enjoy root excavation work, reminds me of being a kid in the sandbox playing archaeologist.
 
My experience with red maples (at condo developements especially for some reason) with girdling root issues is once I air knife the soil away to see whats going on, I find such a tangled, matted mess that I dont even know where to start. In a few cases there were some easy girdling roots to prune where I felt like it was a worthy project, but usually I just end up thinking "this is a waste of time, but I told them it was a gamble".
 
I use either a silky 180 in the dirt or a chisel. I would follow and agree with Tom's advise on where to cut as I Do the same with good results. If the roots are really embedded and near the surface you can always allow the tree to push them out if the damage will be too great on the existing cambium.

If you feel better removing them then go for it. Attached is a photo of a removed girdling root a year later. I really went after this one on a Quercus virginiana. Slight damage but due to the size of the original root it was the lesser of two evils and is healing well.
 
Just cut the girdling root at the most convenient place straight through. When you do you will probably hear a loud pop. That's the stem growth fighting back the steel cable like properties of the root.
There is no need to remove the whole root. Time and stem growth will do the rest.

To get the roots deep in the soil you just need to apply wood chip mulch. Worms will harvest the fungi that start to grow on the mulch and during the night those worms will crawl back to the deepest parts of the soil to find water. In that quest the worm leaves slime covered open highways for the roots to explore the lower parts of the soil Even the almost rock hard non permeable parts can be penetrated in this way.
 
Would you cut a one-inch branch rubbing against a roof? I have learned to be ruthless when cutting girdlers. Why save a dirt path when it cut across a superhighway? Save your flares!
 
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I have learned to be ruthless when cutting girdlers.

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Didn't you mean rootless?
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really need pics here Frinky Blax!

1 locate utilities
2 deep aeration around rootball.
3 cut any sgr that is not grafted, and any advroot in the way. if too many save some for next fall; def get annual mtc contract on these.

chip can rent my mud knife free if that bser with the post oak at weaver street ever decides to do something.

or else maybe we could rcx the centurion oak on the sly--nah hard to do ninjarboriculture with a compressor running...
 
"That post oak will get attention. The man who owns it, (or maybe he doesn't and it's just outside his shop) is a good friend of ours and cares a lot about that tree. We just lit it with a mile of Christmas lights and we were talking about doing this soon."

Yurrite, he was talking about "soon" 3 years ago, after he trashed the rootzone. Now the top is visibly dying back and all he sees in it is a prop for decorations to draw customers. Phony baloney; with good friends like that trees need no enemies.

Trees planted above grade are common; the ONLY treatment is deep aeration. If you don't use a mud knife you can always swing a pick into the brick-hard clay. Lots of fun, that.
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I had a silky folding saw I used for root pruning. Works good while clean, but when dirty it dulled too quickly and blades were expensive. We also use the MS200T whenever the root was big enough to justify it. But even with the airspade, sometimes you can't get all the dirt out.

I bought a battery powered sawzall and we use a Diablo DS1205FG tree pruning blade and that thing does such a great job. It's only like $10 or $15, so even if I go through a few on a big root pruning job, it's not adding "much" to the bill.
 
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...to me teh special concern is that most of the roots might be well above grade on the mound they were planted on.

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How much we talking here? If the existing roots aren't exposed to the air, I wouldn't think this was a problem as new roots would grow below.

Get us some pics!

love
nick
 
Back to this. Pictures as promised. We excavated the root crowns without interfering with the lawns on all 60 trees. Took a few days.

Here are some images of what is going on here:


IMG_20130213_100841 by altacal, on Flickr

Typical poorly grown and poorly planted maples. These are not mulch volcanoes. They are almost all above grade like this. The roots are all tangled up on the mounds but have extended past the mounds and are visible in the patches of turf that each tree is supposed to grow in.

However, reflecting their poor nursery provenance, many of them have badly circling roots.


IMG_20130213_100831 by altacal, on Flickr


IMG_20130214_142055 by altacal, on Flickr

We chiseled out some of the circling roots, but some of them looked too far gone. I expect some of these maples to die suddenly when they finally get choked.

None show any die back yet. Most of them have scale which does not surprise me, which we will treat (I have another post on that).

We are recommending, with the involvement of their landscape guy fortunately, that the lawns be sacrificed and the soil be amended to slope from the outer edge of each mound gently to the edge of the pavement. And then mulching the whole new area lightly. This will result in roots that have escaped the mounds being buried a bit. We are trying to improve the root run for these trees without making matters worse by burying roots too deeply. Hard to decide what the right trade-off is.

We have already regraded each mound by flattening and sloping them a bit better. Some look pretty good and some of them are still like mountains.

Those of you with a lot of experience of these kinds of badly planted and badly grown trees, what do you think the prognosis for these poor things will be?
 
They'll make it to medium age, and then start dying back heavily. Just thinking back to all the reds and sugars girdled like that which might make it to a 12 or 18" tree, and then just head into heavy decline.

Do the best you can I guess, I'm pretty heavy on girdlers as well, and the mat of roots you get in the mulch volcanoes are maddening at best. Keep some sharp hand pruners for those, and start ripping and pulling and cutting back to origin, and with some patience you'll find a real root flare under there somewhere.

Have a generator, or battery powered sawz-all? Bits are cheap, just buy the fast/medium cut wood blades and you'll be off to the races.
 
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