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Old timer at the county extension office told me to stop watering my maples in August...
I've been watering my three silver maples every dry spell for 10 years, thinking I was helping them out. He said I was encouraging surface roots and making the trees weaker, so I quit cold turkey last summer. Sure enough, one of them tipped over in a storm last week with a root ball about 6 inches deep... anyone else had an old school trick that backfired or actually worked?
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nancy_owens27d ago
damn that sucks, i feel for you. i had something kinda similar happen with my oak tree after listening to some advice from a old school landscaper. he told me to stop mulching around the base in the fall cause it "makes the roots lazy" or whatever. next spring we got a drought and that tree lost like half its canopy. some of this old timer wisdom is just straight up bad info honestly. i think a lot of it comes from a time when they didn't really study tree biology or root systems at all. now i just ignore anyone who tells me to stop watering in summer, i'll take surface roots over a tipped over tree any day. sorry you lost one though, that really blows.
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fionak6326d ago
Respectfully disagree, some old school tricks work great if you understand WHY they're telling you that.
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