Winter Tree Care Checklist

Make Sure Your Trees are Ready for the Winter

November marks the boundary between fall and winter, and the weather certainly proves it. While it might be mild and sunny one day, it could snow the next. With real Chicago-style winter on the way, it’s the right time of the season to familiarize yourself with a winter tree care checklist.

After all, you want to protect your trees, which provide so much benefit to your yard. Trees buffer strong winds, provide shade in summer, give your home curb appeal, and serve as homes to all sorts of small animals and insects. And, tree removal can be costly and complex, so it’s important to care for your trees properly during each season.

Winter Tree Care Checklist

1. Prune your trees

To reduce the chance of limb damage during winter’s snow and ice storms, it’s important to have your trees pruned in the late fall or early winter. Trees are dormant now, so it’s a good time to prune. And, pruning can take care of weak or damaged branches or V-shaped crotches, weak areas that might otherwise snap under added weight or stress.

2. Protect young trees

While pruning will protect most established and mature trees, young or newly planted trees might benefit from some additional protection during winter’s harsh weather. Consider a windbreak, wrapping, or other protection. Consult a professional tree service for the best options.

3. Brace your trees

Bracing your trees can provide added protection against damage from winter storms. In addition, cabling or bracing branches over a sidewalk, driveway, or street might guard against a falling branch that could damage a car or hurt a pedestrian.

4. Feed your trees

Although dormant, trees do require hydration and nutrition during the winter. Be sure to water your trees and apply an organic fertilizer as needed before winter gets truly underway. In addition, you might consider the application of mulch to protect and insulate root systems from ice, snow, and salt. Speaking of salt, many trees along parkways get an overdose of salt from plows and road salting trucks. Be sure to clear excess snow away from these trees’ trunks and roots so that, when the snow melts, your tree isn’t absorbing so much salt.

5. Consult a professional

A professional tree service led by a certified arborist can help you ensure your trees are properly cared for each winter. That way, they’ll be able to bring beauty, shade, and majesty when spring and summer roll around again.

Advanced Tree Care combines top-notch equipment, cutting-edge technology, and well-trained staff to provide emergency tree removal and tree maintenance services. With a presence in nine counties and two states, we work daily to provide unparalleled customer service, safety, and efficiency—as well as the expertise to beautify your landscaping and community. Advanced Tree Care isn’t just our name—it’s also our purpose!

Nighttime Commercial Tree Trimming

Daytime hours are prime time for many communities’ central business districts. While vehicle, pedestrian, and commuter traffic can peak during the morning and evening rush hours, a downtown area can be busy all day long.

Because of all this activity, downtown tree trimming operations can be disruptive to residents and businesses. Plus, our trucks can take up prime parking spaces or block off road access. When our workers are up in the trees, a wide area must be cordoned off for their safety, as well as for the safety of drivers and pedestrians. Many area downtowns have a large number of trees, so trimming can take days.

Nighttime Commercial Tree Trimming — There’s a lot of equipment that comes along with commercial tree care and doing it at night can alleviate any inconvenience to residents.

Recently, the Village of Highland Park hired us to conduct tree trimming in its central business district. For the first time ever, though, we conducted all trimming at night. This schedule shift allowed us to care for all area trees while minimizing disruption to everyone requiring access to downtown Highland Park—workers, commuters, shoppers, and more.

This area is busy for a reason. In addition to being home to a vibrant shopping district, Highland Park also counts four Metra stations within its municipal borders—as well as two additional stations in nearby Highwood. Those stations, along with easy access to I-94, mean that the village is home for a large number of commuters. The nearby library and schools create traffic, too.

By conducting our trimming overnight, our workers were able to create safety areas that didn’t also create bottlenecks—and frustration among residents.

Regular tree trimming is essential to keep trees healthy and protect them from storm and seasonal damage. It also creates attractively shaped trees. While some species of trees should only be pruned during dormancy in late fall and winter, many trees can be pruned at any time year-round. With its relatively balmy weather, summer and fall can be excellent times for nighttime tree trimming.

As tree care professionals, we serve both residential and commercial property owners with tree trimming, tree removal, stump removal, tree identification and inventory, advanced thermal tree imaging, land clearing and restoration, and maintenance programs. We are the exclusive contracted tree service provider for ten cities, multiple park districts, and other government agencies, managing over 60 square miles of urban landscape trees and shrubs in 13 counties in Illinois and Wisconsin.

If you’re interested in discussing how nighttime tree trimming can work for your municipality or corporate campus, reach out to us. We’d be happy to create a schedule that works for your community.

Lincolnshire Advanced Tree Care Types

Two Types of Advanced Tree Care in Lincolnshire

Just like humans, trees require comprehensive care because they’re complex beings. Because of this, we look at trees through two lenses when it comes to providing services for our customers. Doing so lets us truly cement our reputation as Advanced Tree Care.

Physical Health

When we talk about a tree’s physical health, we’re really talking about how everything about the tree is working well together. When physically healthy, a tree should have an overall healthy appearance from roots to canopy. Its leaves should be thick and green (except, of course, in fall, or if the tree is a variety that has a non-green leaf). Those leaves shouldn’t display bumpy scales, powdery substances, or any other signs of widespread infestation or damage. Unless it’s late in the fall, its leaves should not be showing signs of stress, discoloration, or dieback.

Lincolnshire Advanced Tree Care Types — Trees have complex systems like the human body, so it’s important to recognize and treat troubling symptoms.

The tree’s canopy should be thriving. While some trees will have dead branches, a physically healthy tree will have no more than 17% dead branches compared with its entirety. The branches and limbs should be free of any disturbances, insect holes, bleeding, peeling bark, mushrooms, or other problems.

The trunk should also be similarly healthy—no loose or deteriorating bark, obvious insect holes, or other signs of stress or decline. At the base of the tree, the root flares should be free of any soils, mulches, and debris. Root flares, especially of mature trees, should be pronounced—meaning you’re able to see them and they crest over the top of the soil.

These details are all the things our experienced staff and certified arborists consult when assessing the physical health of any tree we care for.

Structural Health

A tree’s structural health has to do with the strength and soundness of its overall structure. In a structurally healthy tree, the limbs and branches are free of inclusions, bifurcations, embeds, rubbing, and competing limbs. Though these are terms specific to tree care, the concept is simpler than the words suggest: if your tree’s branches look complete, distinct from another, and are growing healthy and separately, your tree is likely to be structurally healthy. If its branches don’t fit this description, it may be time to consult a certified arborist.

The tree’s limbs and trunk should also have good taper—meaning the limb and each branch start wider and gradually thin out. Branch distribution should be relatively even around the trunk and throughout the canopy, and the tree should be free of bark disturbances.

An array of factors can affect a tree’s structural health: age, infestation, disease, weather, and accidents all factor in. So do particularly hot summers and particularly cold and icy winters.

Now that you know the difference between physical health and structural health when it comes to trees, we hope you’ll be looking at the trees in your yard with new eyes. And if you notice anything that raises an alarm, be sure to call on a certified arborist to assess the health of your tree.

Professional Tree Care

When Do I Need a Professional to Handle My Tree Care?

Trees make up about 15% of your overall yard landscape. While 15% doesn’t seem like a lot on the surface, think about how important your trees are. They provide shade, they provide visual variety, and they’re a long-lived member of your ecosystem.

Trees can also be costly to replace or remove. Caring for them properly is not only the right thing to do for the environment, it’s the right thing to do to protect your investment. Any signs of stress, deterioration, or disease should be a clear indication that a tree health diagnosis—provided by an ISA Certified Arborist—is in your best interest.

Reasons to Consult a Professional on Tree Care

As a homeowner, when do you know you need to consult a professional? The following list of conditions or symptoms is a goodplace to start, although it’s not an exhaustive list. You should consult a certified arborist if you notice any of the following:

Thin, dwarfed, or damaged leaves
Tree care can be tricky and costly, which is why hiring a certified arborist is the best way to protect your property.
Leaf colors other than dark green (except for certain trees—such as Japanese or Norway maples—or during early spring and fall, of course)
Leaves that are slow to bud in spring
Leaves that drop early, before true fall has begun
Dieback at the tips of your trees
Dead or dying limbs
Dead or dying leaves
Bumpy scales or powdery substances on the bark, root flares, branches, or leaves
Loose, deteriorating, or heavily flaking bark
Growths such as mushrooms on the trunk, limbs, roots, or beneath your tree
Insect holes and/or bleeding on the tree’s trunk or branches
External damage from an impact to the tree—from a car collision or an accident with a winter snowplow (sometimes common along parkways)
Weather damage, from intense summer storms, ice storms, heavy winter snowfall, or ice
Damage from drought or spells of intense hot weather

If you’re noticing any of these signs, calling in a certified arborist can help you address a situation before it worsens. There are certainly conditions under which a tree cannot be saved, but there are plenty where an early intervention can save a beloved tree. Just imagine your yard without that grand oak in the corner or the beautiful maple shading your front porch. When in doubt, call us to come on out.