Thank you for your patience! That was a long discussion about soils and watering and if you made it to here, I can guarantee you will have stronger, healthier, happier trees that will require very little other maintenance. Insect spraying, overfertilizing, overpruning and trunk injection all quickly fall away in the presence of a strong healthy tree. One that, although it finds itself in a less-than-ideal urban setting is doing about as well as it can. Your tree had something all others are strongly jealous of: you! Someone who knows, cares, and loves it as it loves you. Lucky tree, lucky human.
Once you do all this digging, sampling, measuring and corrective changes and practices, you will be different, no longer a marginal or surface participant on your property. You have made major steps to becoming a good steward of your land; you have bonded with it. It will never be the same. This is a huge part of what I call being at home. Now, on to some very cool stuff trees have done for time nearly immeasurable: how they grow, how their major fluid systems work, a few essential chemical processes they mastered early on, really a brief overview of the major systems of a healthy tree body.
