Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Girdled Tree

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Here is the Girdled Tree I teased you about. What? You were expecting more arboreal underwear? This is Pure Florida, not Victreeias Secrets.

Okay, I'll stop. This is a laurel oak that has a really poorly formed top with weak limb joints and no central leader. Plus, it is really shading my backyard pistol range. (Wouldn't you hate to be my neighbor?)

I chose to girdle this tree rather than cut it down. The purpose of girdling is to sever the phloem tubes that carry glucose from the leaves where it has been produced. If I have cut deep enough, the roots of this oak will starve to death. The leaves will drop, branches will weaken and begin to fall and the pileateds will thank me for giving them one more standing snag to hunt bugs on. Sometime this summer, during a tropical storm, the dead trunk will fall to nourish the forest soil. My shooting range will be sunny again.

I'm in no hurry.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't suppose you cut your boy's hair too, do you?

R.Powers said...

Pablo,
???...is it that bad?

Rurality said...

No I'd love to be your neighbor, if you'd clean my gun for me after I was done borrowing your shooting range. For some reason hubby thinks I should do such things myself. The nerve! :)

R.Powers said...

Rurality,
Cool! You continue to amaze me. Uh...hubby's right though (ducking).

The MacBean Gene said...

We all could take a lesson on recycling from nature.

R.Powers said...

Macbean,
Especially in FL.

Deb said...

I've done some haircuts that resemble that...

R.Powers said...

Deb,
Well it grows back...usually.

Karen Schmautz said...

The hair or the tree? \

On a serious note...do you worry about the timing of the tree falling, or do people just avoid the area during a storm or...seems a little dangerous to me, but then I don't have machete weilding teens in my forest, either.

R.Powers said...

Hick,
It's not near anything it could hurt and 99.9% of the time, nobody is near it.