When the weather starts warming, days start to grow a little longer, flowers start to bud, and it begins to look a lot like Spring! Early spring is one of the best times of the year to prune any of your trees that will soon begin to grow their flowers and leaves back. When done properly, making pruning a part of your spring lawn care routine can make your trees healthier and help prevent further damage to the tree and your yard.

Spring Lawn Care Tips

Pruning is not only removing the dead or damaged branches of your tree, it’s making the whole tree healthier and stimulating new growth, like waking it up after a long winter’s nap. You want to prune your tree while it’s still in a dormant state for several reasons:

1. Removing broken or damaged limbs is less stressful when the tree is not actively growing.
2. It’s easier to see which limbs need to be removed without leaves blocking the view.
3. The tree will still have time to recover from fresh cuts before growing season is in full swing.
4. There will be less sap flowing from the cuts.
5. There’s less of a risk of pest infestation since they’re also inactive this time of year.

Added Benefits of Pruning

Many insects tend to look for the decaying parts of a tree as a Welcome Home sign, so when you remove these parts from your tree you’re also helping to keep these organisms out. When you remove the weaker limbs, you’re helping to provide more food and water to the healthier sections of the tree, strengthening it, thus preventing further damage which could lead to safety hazards throughout your yard.

Take care in the way you remove branches so that you don’t end up hurting your tree.

It’s the Best Time of Year to Prune Trees

Contact Cardinal Lawns to learn more about the proper way to prune your tree to keep it–and your yard–looking its best.