Do it yourself tree care

When I take care of gardens, I do a lot of stuff. I dig up weeds, I plant flowers and vegetables, and I prune shrubbery and small trees. One thing that I don’t do is to prune large shade trees. I don’t have the skills or the equipment to do that sort of work. If you need to have your tree pruned, you’ll want to hire a certified arborist to complete the job.

But one thing that I do, and that any home gardener can do, is to remove the suckers from the bottom of the tree trunks. So you’re asking… what is a sucker? It is a shoot that grows from the tree’s trunk. It is not good for the tree to have these suckers. They are strong stems that have the potential to take over the tree’s trunk.

This is the tree trunk, with all of that stuff growing out of the trunk. As you can see, not only is it bad for the tree, it is also extremely unattractive.

With pruners and loppers, I cut off each sucker, one at a time, as close to the trunk as possible in an effort to prevent the suckers from growing back.