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Pro tip: the old climber at the job site was wrong about topping that silver maple
An old timer on a removal job in Ravenswood told me to just top a silver maple instead of a full takedown. He said it would be cheaper and the tree would bounce back. I did it to save the homeowner about $600. Two years later that maple threw 14 feet of weak water sprouts in every direction, and the next storm dropped a 6 inch limb through the homeowner's fence. Cutting it back to a stub only forced the tree to panic grow, and I ended up doing the full removal anyway for twice what I quoted. If a tree looks too far gone to keep, a hard cut just puts off the bill. What do you all tell folks who want to top a tree to save money?
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the_stella12d ago
Cutting a tree back to a stub is not the same thing as topping it properly, and I have seen silver maples come back just fine from a hard cut when the cut was done right and the tree was healthy to start with. The water sprouts you got were the tree's way of saying it had too much stored energy and no place to put it, which usually means the cut was too flat or too high. A good reduction cut back to a real lateral branch, even a small one, gets you regrowth that is attached solid instead of those weak sprouts that shoot straight up. I get why the old timer's advice burned you, but writing off every hard cut because of one bad job is throwing out a tool that works.
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