 Okay. Maybe I'll take this off, huh? I'll live dangerously for a minute. I'm Margaret Skinner. I'm the president of Right Now, Burlington, and I'm also the manager of the TreeNer Tree, which is located up at the UVM Art Cultural Research Center. And it's great to have you all here today. This is the first event, sort of public event we've had in two years. It's pre-COVID. Yeah. So we used to do these things all the time. We stopped doing it during COVID, and so now we're back. So it's great to have you all here. And so I wanted to say just a couple of things. First, hopefully all of you have got one of these little things, which has all our various activities. Now as the tree nursery manager, May 7th is really important to me. That's when we do the tree planting and the nursery. It's lots of fun. Again, for two years we haven't had it as a public event. And so we have about 150 trees. We'll be planting in the nursery in two to three years. They will be going out onto the streets of Burlington, and we supply the city. It's a really joint activity. But trees from the nursery, about 150 of them every year get planted out onto the streets and into our parks. So the more help that we get, the better. So then the other thing I wanted to just say, because a lot of people have been asking about it, is what we used to call gypsy moth, and now we call it the spongy moth. I don't really like the name. I used to work on gypsy moth. I mean spongy moth back when I was a graduate student. And so I like the old name. But it's now called the spongy moth. And it is certainly around in some areas. I looked on the trees over here, and the hackberries, and there's a bunch of egg masses there. And on your private trees, it is possible to scrape off the egg masses into a can of soapy water and get rid of them, foster them, toilet or whatever. And that will reduce the depoliation. And if you have a small tree, it's probably worth doing that. And you've probably seen information about quitting for a lot of venues around the trees. That's worth doing if you have a few really special trees in your yard. It makes a difference. But it requires some diligence on your part. The state is not going to be doing any aerial spraying. And so you get what you get. And it just to remind people, for many years we used to have gypsy moth, spongy moth outbreaks every six to eight years. And then a fungus came along and started keeping that pest problem in check. And I think because of the hot weather. Dry spring last year. That fungus just wasn't able to do anything. Maybe this year will come back enough, we'll see. But in the meantime, doing some of these other things like scraping off the egg masses, etc. really will make a difference on your on your trees at home. Pardon me. Oh, that's a good question. Usually they're under the bark under bark flaps. Sometimes on lower, if you have a branch like that, it'll be right at the base there. One of the problems there, they're a little bigger than a quarter, typically oval in shape and sort of tan colored and fuzzy little masses. You can't miss them. And it's very easy to scrape them off like with a knife or something like that. Just they'll fall right off. Well, you know, that's an interesting question. I used to always do that. And you know, the experts, they say you should really collect them because I thought you were the expert. Anyway, if you don't have something and you see an egg mass, scrape it off. And maybe, you know, the beetles and the ants will come on and get them. Or you scrape them off and kind of rub them in the ground. It's better if you can scrape them off into something. But if you can't, then do what you can. Okay. Now it was one other meaningful thing. Oh well. In June, in first Saturday in June, we're doing a tree walk at Lake View Cemetery. It'll be on the Branch out Burlington website. I don't know. I don't remember the exact date and time, but if you're into trees, Lake View Cemetery in the north end to have some awesome trees, we're just going to walk around and talk about different attributes of different trees and how to identify them. And it's usually pretty fun. So I'd love a show of hands. How many of you came because you got a card in the mail that said a tree was going to be planted in front of your house? One person. One. Okay. That's good. You know, one of the things that's been really important to me in regards to my involvement in branch out Burlington is to make sure that people within the city of Burlington or wherever realize that taking care of the trees on our street is all of our responsibilities, not just VJ and his team. And so if you see a branch that's broken off, you call him up and say, VJ, will you get out there? I call him up all the time and tell him. He has to make all the calls now. But really, he can't be everywhere. And so you are the eyes and ears of what's going on with the trees. And if you're so moved, you could even help water them. They, in the first year after a tree is planted, and you're going to see trees all over the city that have those funny looking green bags. Those are, generally speaking, those are trees that came from our nursery. They're like plain children. So the more that you care for them too, the better we all like it. And the better chance they have of surviving over time. I think that's all the only meaningful thing I have to say. And thank you very much, VJ, and take it away. All right. I'm VJ Comay. I'm the city arborist. I've been with the city for four years now. It was four years in February. And we're going to talk trees. When I'm done with this presentation, when I asked earlier, there wasn't a lot of you that are actually brewing to residents. How many? Show of hands. I'm going to give a little overview of what we've been doing in the city over the last few years and what our plans are moving forward. So when I'm done with this, if you want to leave, I won't be offended. If you don't, if you're not interested in what's going on in town. Trees for posterity. The British author George Orwell once said, the planting of a tree, especially one of the long living hardwood species, is a gift that we can give to posterity with almost no trouble and an almost no cost. And if it should take root, it'll far outlive the actions, the visible site of any of your actions, good or evil, something to that effect. Interesting. When I read that quote, I wonder if George Orwell actually planted a tree in his life. And I think probably not because unless you're planting a tree from a seed, it does require some effort and it usually comes at can be a considerable cost. But our goal is to plant our trees for posterity. And far too often, that is not the case because a lot of steps went wrong along the way. So our goal, you know, I've planted, I was a nursery man for 23 years, right out of college. And then I worked for a tree care company. And not with the city of Burlington. And in my lifetime, I've probably planted conservatively 30 to 40,000 trees with the ones I've grown in the nursery and transplanted. And every time I plant a tree, it's great because I'm thinking, man, this could be here long after I'm gone for future generations. Unfortunately, in the most extreme cases, this is a kind of thing we do. Or this. And then every spring we give them lots of love. We over mulch them. So when we think about trees and their natural environment, you have to have an understanding of what trees want. I mean, we put them out in our urban landscapes and around our homes, very different environment. So when you walk in the woods, what do you see? You see a variety of species, you see this natural cycling of nutrients year after year, you've got leaves and debris falling, stuff breaking down. Soil temperatures much cooler. This provides an amazing environment for microorganisms of all kinds that are beneficial to the tree, whether it's fungus and insects and all kinds of stuff going on in there. And then if you take a hike in the woods and you'll notice that even over short distances, the tree species will change. They all find their little niche. You're not going to see silver maples growing high on a dry mountain ridge. And conversely, you're not going to find some of those high mountain region trees growing on a river bottom in a flood plain. They all are growing in the right spot for them. And at the base of every tree, and especially as they get older, you see this very pronounced root flare. And it's not, and it becomes more pronounced with age. And it's not just some trees, it's every tree. And the bulk of the tree's root system that's uptaken water and nutrients is growing in that upper layer. I mean, some trees species will put down some pretty deep roots, you know, anchor roots. But the vast majority are the roots are in that top layer where you've got all your nutrients, all that microbial activity, you know, good moisture there. And most importantly, oxygen. Tree roots need oxygen to function. So they primarily in that top layer. So this all success in planting any tree starts with planting the right tree in the right place. So what does that mean? When you're assessing a site, if you have a site on your property and you want to plant a tree, what kinds of things are you thinking about to find the tree that suited to that site? Anybody? Mount of light exposure, drainage, the overall height of the species overall size. Anything else? Salt tolerance, if you're close to roadways, walkways, driveways, that's a good one. Lot of things to take into consideration. When you talked about drainage, you're talking about soil types. So do you do you all and another thing that people don't take into account and I see this all the time is how the trees are going to interact with the other plants on your property over time. And I see this a lot when people plant their little home orchard, I'm going to buy a half a dozen fruit trees and they plant them six feet apart. And that's great for the first few years. But then when the trees are start to get up to fruiting size, what do you want an orchard? You want it to be open with lots of light and good airflow. And they have these trees that are all crowded out. And I stuck this photo and this is a landscape just to show you. I mean, maybe the intention here was to create a forest, I don't know over time, but you've got this white pine growing 20 feet from an oak that's going to be as big as the one in that first photo I showed you. So soils are really important. I put this up here. This company I used to work for prior to coming to the city. And we did a lot of soil testing on properties. If you are on a site, a new site, new to you, you bought a new home, you built a new home, you might consider doing a soil test just to see what's there. More importantly is understanding the drainage of the soil. I mean, most of our soils around here, trees are not heavy feeders. It's not like trying to grow corn for one season where it's going to grow six feet in a year. Most of the macro and micronutrients that are important for tree growth are there in adequate quantities. Most soil tests, there's a soil testing lab at UVM, I believe. You can send it away to private labs. Come back, your main ones, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, calcium, your pH, which a lot of our common trees that we plant are tolerant of a fairly wide pH range in that neutral range. But it may be important to know. I won't spend a lot of time on that. But more importantly, if you've done any amount of gardening on your property or digging, you're familiar with what your soils are like. And it may change from one portion of your property to another. So a sugar maple may be the right choice for one well-drained part of the property, but you might have a low spot where everything drains to that tends to stay wet. And guess what? The sugar maple is not going to make it there. So just some real basics about soil and knowing what you got. I've planted many trees for people over the years and I'll go on their property and they'll say, oh, we'd really like this type of tree and I bring a shovel. Like, wow, you're the only person who's ever come here and dug a hole. I said, well, I got to see what you got for soil. And you can tell a lot by digging a hole eight, 10, 12 inches deep and looking at the soil and feeling the soil. A sandy soil that's going to drain really rapidly, dry out rapidly, not hold moisture is going to have that gritty feel to it, right? Larger soil particles. A clay soil that's going to be heavier, going to retain more water and nutrients, but also be slower to drain. You can actually wet the soil and press it through your thumb and forefinger and make a little ribbon with it. And then you have silty soils somewhere in between. So just just having an idea of what you have for soils and drainage. If a soil is poorly drained, if you dig a hole, you're going to see a couple of things and you're actually going to smell it. That anaerobic with that high water table and no oxygen, it's going to smell sort of septic-y or sort of rotting. It has a very distinct smell to it. You'll also see some modeling in the soil like gray streaking and stuff. Again, most of you, if you're here, have probably spent some time digging holes in the ground around your property. So you have a good idea of what your soils are like. So we can buy trees in a number of different ways to plant. Baldenberg Lapt, Container Grown, or Beirut. And Beirut is not as common as it should be, and I'll talk a little more about that later. So we're going to kind of go through that and what to look for in buying a tree. So Beirut trees. Beirut trees are grown in native soil, in a nursery, and harvested typically they're either hand dug or most often they're dug with a hydraulic machine, a tree spate. It can be a great way to get a pretty sizable tree. The cons to that is this thing weighs, you know, several hundred pounds depending on the size. You may need specialized equipment to move it around. When these trees are harvested from a nursery, they can lose up to 85 or 90 percent of their existing root system is left in the field. So this is the way I grew trees for many years. This was a photo taken at the nursery I managed back in 2013. If you're going to buy a tree, Baldenberg Lapt, some things you're looking for, as a standard for the industry, the root ball diameter should be 10 to 12 inches of diameter root ball per inch of caliper of the tree. Sometimes I'll see trees in garden centers that, you know, a two inch tree with a 12 inch root ball. The other thing you want to make sure that it's centered in that root ball because you're losing a lot of roots already. So if they cut it really close on one side, make sure the root ball is solid. It's not falling apart. Some of these bigger garden centers manhandle these things with machinery. They drop them, they bang them around, they get banged around on the truck, on the truck. You're making sure that the tree is not all scarred. So here's a good example. It's about a two inch tree that's about a 28 inch root ball there and they typically have a wire basket. Container grown trees are a great way to plant a tree, especially for the average homeowner. You can get a pretty sizable tree in a plastic container. It's easy to handle. You can put it in the back of your Volvo or whatever you have for a car, get it home and plant it. I see a lot of the same problems with container grown trees that I see with trees grown in a nursery in the ground in Baldwin Burlap. Not a great photo there but we'll talk a little bit about that. But when you buy a container grown tree, I advise people ask the person at the garden center or nursery to pull that tree partway out of the pot so you can look at the root system. Because one of the biggest problems with container grown trees is people leave them in there too long. And so they form all these woody roots that wind around the inside of the pot. You've seen house plants like that or perennials that you've popped out but those are really fibrous roots. You can take a fork or a knife or your pruning shears and loosen that up. This is kind of what you should see. The soil should hold together but you shouldn't be seeing a lot of woody roots wrapped around. I've seen it all in garden centers. This was in a local garden center several years ago and I was just walking around looking at the pots and taking pictures. You can clearly see a root here that's already wrapped around the trunk and already embedding into the tree. Top of the tree looked fine. You look at that say oh what a nice little healthy tree. Unknowingly take this home and this this is not a tree for posterity here. This is a tree that's going on your compost pile in a year. Is that called girdling? It's a girdling root. And there's reasons why that happens and we'll talk about that. This is what you more often see coming out of containers. So if the garden center is not willing to show you that root system or if they do and this is a sort of thing you see walk away because when you pay that kind of money for a tree in the container you shouldn't have to do this because that is really the only way you're going to address those girdling roots. This was that my previous employer was Bartlett tree experts. They have a research lab in North Carolina and I took somebody from UVM actually down there for clients days kind of thing and they spent a couple days showing the research and they were showing trees in containers with these girdling roots and this guy said this is the only method that we saw for really separating those roots and making it so this tree could have a future. And that thing was sharp as a razor and he went around and then he teased all those roots out and they planted it and of course you're setting the tree back. The whole idea with a container grown tree is that unlike the Baldwin Burlap tree you've got the entire root system of the tree there. So if it's in good shape and it's planted correctly and put it in the ground and you don't have these girdling issues you can have good luck with it. This is a tree they had on the same property where they didn't do their axe treatment just put it in the ground this was about six seven years later and this tree is not showing the crown was not showing any outward signs yet of these girdling roots but it's just a matter of time and we'll talk about what happens there. One of the big pitfalls and what leads to failure down the road of any tree whether it's container grown or nursery grown or even bare root is being planted too deep. Okay sometimes the trees come from the nursery that way. I spent a summer doing consulting work for the state of Vermont for the Department of Transportation as a consulting arborist where I oversaw the planting of trees on one large project in particular in Morrisville. Over 700 trees were put in on this stretch of new road that they built and about 75 percent of the deciduous trees this is what we found. I had the landscape contractor open the root ball these trees the top of the root ball and search for that root flare remember the root flare we saw and you can see here this is what we found we're not even down to the root flare yet really really common this is one of the trees on the same site these are Felco pruners are eight and a quarter inches long. This was a soil line in the root ball this sort of crook here is the graft union of this tree so most of our trees if you go out and buy a red maple it's a named cultivar it might be northwood red maple or you might buy a snow drift crab apple all these named cultivars or varieties for the most part are grafted so typically two to three and a half inches above that root flare is where you will see this graft union and you can see down here just the beginnings of that root flare so and oftentimes if trees are planted this way it does not kill them immediately it happens over time and so you have this tree and it's doing well and then you know all of a sudden it's really starting to do what you intended it to do when you planted it and you're like what's happening to the top of the tree it looks thin it's dying back and this is the issue we find sometimes it can happen very quickly this was a tree I sold for my nursery I sold to a landscaper he bought I think 12 or 14 of them to line both sides of a driveway and a new home that had been built this was in May this May of 2013 we had a ton of rain he called me up the next week these trees were all leafed out starting to leaf out they looked beautiful and they left the nursery called me the next week and he said yeah one of these trees just up and died so I said oh I'll come take a look at it we had a ton of rain this is a heavy clay soil in charlotte this is a hybrid maple it's a cross between a red and a silver maple it's actually I think it was an autumn blaze maple so those two species tolerate you know you think of them as trees that will take some heavy soils and wetter conditions but when I looked a little closer at that tree oh and I guess I don't have the photo you'll notice the base of the tree looks like a fence post going in the ground I excavated around it and and I know when it left the nursery that that root flare was at the top of the root ball because that's the way I planted it in the nursery and he had gone in there with an excavator dug these holes plopped the trees in and this was eight or ten inches too deep this species has a very very shallow root system they're typically right up in the surface so that soil was heavily saturated those roots were buried and the tree just petered out and died and I'm going to drive this point home this is another tree in charlotte this was a guy that called me on the fourth of july he loved his landscape and he said hey what are you up to today so I'm just hanging out he said I have a maple on my front lawn and I'm really concerned about it I wondered if you could take a look at it I said sure I'm not into parades or fireworks I'm coming over so he said oh I'm going to put my boat in the water or whatever he was doing he said let me know what you find so I pulled in this guy's driveway and pulling up to this tree I noticed two things I noticed the top of the crown of the tree to me looked a little off color and a little bit thin and again the tree looks like a telephone pole going in the ground I said oh I know what's going on here so I started to excavate around it with a little garden tool and this is what I found these are roots encircling the tree you can actually see a little bit of a swelling of the trunk above that point so what happened with this tree and there's a better photo and so I called this guy I said John I don't have good news your tree is done you said what do you mean it's done I said well the tree got planted too deep and over time these roots grew up upward because they want to have more oxygen and they tend to grow around the tree over time and as the roots grow in diameter and the tree grows in diameter it starts choking off that vascular tissue of the tree and where you're going to start see decline is in the upper canopy of the tree I said it's too late unfortunately if you catch this problem early enough if you notice there's no root flare on the tree and and you excavate and you find roots and you cut them fine but once you see that those roots are embedded and you're starting to see an outward decline at the top of the tree it's done and he didn't want to hear it he said oh what would you normally do I said you go in there and cut the roots you can actually take a chisel and pop them and pull them away and cut them away oh I'm going to work on I'm going to work on it and I said no your tree is done you'll take it down in a year and he he did well what he said to me was he he said there's no way I planted that tree too deep he said I bought two of these maples my son and I spent the entire weekend planting these trees they bought them from a local nursery bald and burlap brought them home he said we dug huge holes we put them in the holes and we had that root ball just even with the top with the existing grade I said I bet you did the problem was it came from the nursery that way so he didn't know enough to look for that root flare and unfortunately these trees like I said were just getting to the point where they were doing what he intended it was probably I think he said it was 11 years so that's a good question you a nursery probably might not let you do that because that you know once that burlaps compromise they'd have to retie it all but you can mitigate it at the time of planting and we'll talk about that and just to drive this point home again this when I was working for the tree care company this was actually in the far north end of Burlington I was called to this condo complex they said we have these elms lining the driveway and I don't know what's going on with them there you know a lot of them seem to be suffering so I pulled in and this first tree look at this robust all these trees were planted at the same size same day same soil conditions got the same exact care and what do you notice anybody maybe you can't see it from there I can see the root flare of this tree and all the others look like fence posts they looked like this so it makes a difference planting depth matters over mulching will have the same effect and I'll talk a little bit about over mulching and the other problems with that a great tool that we had at the company I worked for and we actually own one with the city of Burlington is a air spade this is run by a compressor high pressure air specialized nozzle where we could excavate around the around the base of that tree we did a root collar excavation so instead of going in there with a shovel or a rake or a gardening tool where you're physically injuring those roots that might be there we go in and in 30 seconds just blow the soil away around these trees and I would recognize trees on properties I wasn't seeing the root flare but I'm not seeing any outward signs yet with the tree so I'm like now's the time to catch it and we didn't always catch it in time but this is some of what we found no it's high it's pretty high pressure it was the coolest tool because I would explain to homeowners what was going on and then my guy would come in and I look like a hero I'm like here's what we're going to find and there it was but we found all kinds of stuff you know again you don't see the root flare here you're probably seeing a graft union the root flare somewhere underneath and are you supposed to see the root flare on all trees or the you should all trees but younger trees that's not going to be very pronounced so when you plant a younger tree or you buy a tree in a container you have to dig down a little bit but you'll start to see that tapering outward and that's that's where your soil line wants to be but it definitely becomes way more pronounced with the age of the tree other interesting things we found baskets wire baskets so if you're planting a bald and burlap tree we'll talk about removing the basket but these baskets are made of galvanized steel I've excavated trees that were in the ground for 30 years and that basket looks like the day it went in it does not rust away so you can see here these trees grow through these openings in the wire basket and over time that's going to start girdling those roots and it may not end up girdling the whole tree but it's going to impede on the function of major roots so the tree's got enough struggles and if all of a sudden a portion of its root system is not functioning to its full capacity you will see outward signs in the top of the tree so let's talk about planting a tree and the process would be the same whether you're planting bare root trees container trees or bald and burlap trees and I'll talk and and at the end there's a link last year on arbor day I went up to uvm campus and we made an 18 minute video of me planting a bare root tree and it actually came out really good it's a step by step and I kind of narrate it and so I recommend it's on youtube I think you put a link at the end here and you could check that out if you haven't heard enough nonsense from me so this is right up the road from my house several years ago I had a neighbor who I've done a lot of planting for and she likes to talk she's like the whole time so I gave her a camera and I said just take a picture when I tell you so if you're planting any tree first thing I'll say you selected your right tree for the right spot you've taken into consideration the light the exposure the size you need the soil types all that with the the other existing trees around and how they're going to interact whether you're planting on private property or you're involved with a community service thing where you're planting on public property really important if you unless you're absolutely certain call dig safe before you stick a shovel in the ground your communication line could be underground a gas line who knows if you're new to the property it's a free service they notify the utilities they come out they mark everything that's what I was doing today in Burlington marking all our new tree sites and I'll call them in to dig safe remove the sod if you're in a lawn get the sod out of there I typically I cut a circle ideally two up to three times the diameter of the root ball or container that you're putting in now on this this was being planted in a pasture on the edge of a pasture out in front of this house undisturbed soil for many many years I could take a shovel and just go and put it all the way in the ground easily so I didn't need to dig this big hole but if you're in a more compacted site or you know the soil is rugged the bigger the hole and you break that soil up the better I remove the sod I cut a nice circle then I cut all these little pie shapes and I skim it off just below the surface of the grass roots I don't usually put that sod back in with the backfill because one thing that's really important is good soil root to soil contact and so when you start putting in these clumps of grass you're going to have air pockets in there it's hard to chop it up use it to patch holes in your lawn put throw it on your compost pile I I just usually don't put it back in the hole um how deep are we going to dig that hole how how deep twice as deep somebody said anybody else how deep that's right so you don't want to dig any deeper than the depth of that root ball from the bottom to wherever you determine that root flare to be okay you don't want to go any deeper because you're going to loosen that soil then you're going to end up throwing it back in and then it's going to settle and the tree can settle it can list it can end up you know being too deep ultimately so if I were planting a balden burlap tree or a container tree the first thing I would do is make sure I can find that root flare and it is not always at the top of that root ball and same thing with the containers I can show you pictures of container trees that look like you know a bamboo stake going in the there's no root flare it's somewhere buried down there so just take a tool your fingers find that root flare pull that soil away and then measure the distance from the bottom of the root ball to where that root flare is and when I say the root flare you want that soil line to be right where those first surface roots are so this tree came from my nursery I knew it was planted at the right depth so I in the nursery when I harvested it so I just got a stake here and I measured and then I dug my hole and I checked my depth by laying a flat rake handle across you can use a stake run a string whatever see I got to go a little a little bit deeper there um better to plant slightly high especially in a poorly drained soil that's okay you can taper your your backfill down from it but you know ideally you want to be right where that root flare is what if it's rocky is that a tree or the roots or no if it's a stony or soil but you're going to remove major debris we'll we'll talk about that so if your tree has a basket on it people are like how do you get that basket off without the tree falling apart um these are $12 little bolt cutters that I bought at the local hardware store these baskets typically have three or four horizontal wires going around and then the verticals so the first thing I do is tip the root ball to one side and cut all of the verticals right below this bottom horizontal rung so I cut cut cut tip the tree the other way do the same thing I can pull that bottom right off root ball is not going anywhere then I cut the bottom top and bottom wires on one side and then the opposite side so now I've just got that wire in the middle holding that's a preform basket it's pretty rugged wire still holding things together so you can see I take the bottom off there cutting the top and bottom wires on one side tipping it and putting the other way then you're going to roll the tree in the hole hopefully you have help or or you have a piece of machinery but you're going to get the tree in the hole again you see that hole is not as wide as I would normally dig it but this soil was just so loose those tree roots the new roots were going to have no issue finding their way so I'm just straightening straightening the tree in the hole getting it where I want it and I always like to pile my soil on a tarp save yourself a lot a lot of cleanup put the soil on a tarp you got everything there contain it all then I go back and cut that center wire on either side and the basket comes off and two pieces gone and I've talked to landscapers like oh we can't take the baskets off the trees will fall apart and I show them this trip we had we had trees planted for the city where I worked with a contractor and said this is how you do it and it's simple and it's going to take you five minutes more and that basket's not going to be there and be my problem 10 years from now and then you get rid of the burlap most burlap on trees these days they used to use that synthetic burlap you remember that John the stuff was like that plasticky burlap that you'd get like a grain sack and it would never go away burlap today is natural burlap they do treat it so it doesn't rot so prevalently but especially the stuff buried in the bottom of the hole where there's not as much oxygen will be there for a long time so I take my pruners or typically my wife's kitchen shears and she's always asking me where the hell did the kitchen shears go and that's what I use them for take that burlap away any barrier between the root system of this tree and the surrounding soil is going to impede its ability to get established and then you're going to backfill really important whether it's bare root tree planting container or bald and burlap chop up that back soil chop it up especially that back field especially if you have a more clay or clumpy soil remove any bigger rocks or debris you find in there just so that those new roots can find their way through there and I usually on a bigger tree like this I'll I'll fill it a third of the way then I'll take my shovel and get that soil to settle fill in any air pocket if it's a bare root tree and you would see this in this video you know it's bare root there's no soil on the root so there's all these spaces between the big roots and the fibrous roots so typically once I get it covered I'll take the tree and I'll shake it a little I'll just jiggle it a little and if that soil is really loose it'll filter down through those roots and make good contact then we'll backfill some more do it again and then when we get to the top with those bare root trees you take the handle of a shovel or a stake and then just lightly go around and you'll see that soil settle in around those roots good soil to root contact is really really important no no definitely not you can water at that point some people will put a slow trickle on there and let it soak in and that'll help to settle the soil people do it different ways this is the way I've always done it you see I'm taking my shovel going around the outside of that root ball settling that soil and coming up in lifts and then some light tamping with your foot you really don't want to stomp down hard do you loosen up the soil below the ball before you put it in or you can dig it down and let it I just dig it to that level so it's got a good solid surface to sit on you know and like I said and I've grown a lot of trees and I've seen so many root systems I can't count some will have deeper roots and others some species but the vast majority of those tree roots that are up taking water and nutrients are going to be in that top profile of soil so it's does the ball ever settle too far down like if that soil is really kind of loose like you said it's you know it well by time you get down you know 30 inches it wasn't as loose you get into more of a subsoil there you know the soil profile changes the top couple inches and you can actually no no typically not okay no and then we mulch so why do we mulch trees retain moisture and while it can improve soil quality over time as it breaks down keep the weeds down what's a big one for me anyway keep lawn mowers and weed whackers away you know in the in the trees in the natural environment have that organic matter every year and it's breaking down over time and it keeps soil temperatures lower it promotes that environment that's better for those beneficial microorganisms which you will find in in urban soils they're there a lot of times the mycorrhizae fungus the symbiotic relationship they're there and and so we're providing a good environment mulch is generally a good thing two to three inch layer total total not every year that year after year no let's put three more five more six more and never up against the trunk of the tree leave a space there you can see here the the root flare of that tree is right there i can see it on the left here so you're pulling that out away if you start piling mulch around that bark the bark tissue the trunk tissue is very different than the than the root tissue and over time you'll get a rot rotting of the outer bark it'll start to compromise the inner vascular tissue of the tree you know fungus and all kinds of stuff if you pile the mulch really high like bark mulch over time this kind of growing bark mulch you ever see it mid summer when you try to put water on it what happens it just runs off it forms like a skin like a duck's back so you know i trees around my house i haven't mulched in years i i've used wood chips in the last few years what i've been doing is when my leaves come down in the fall i set up my lawn more high and i mow over them chop them up a little and i rake them around this circle why because that's what they do in nature that's what they want you know i mean the maple tree doesn't grow with ground pine bark around it right it grows with decaying maple leaves around it so you know people like this look it has its purpose but too much of a good thing and you know every year at this time of year you're going to see in a couple weeks here they come the maintenance companies and oh we're going to make this property beautiful and they're going to pay us to kill their trees we're just going to keep piling it on and we sell it by the yard so yeah i was at my mother's house and then gardeners came and they did the exact opposite they they got their leaf blowers out and they blew all the stuff away that i put off around the trees it was unbelievable well i hear landscape companies they say oh but we removed the old mulch every year yeah and i'm like oh what's the purpose go in there every year and scuff it up loosen it up with a rake and it'll help it break down and if it you know if you want a fresh look just put a little dusting on but don't exceed that three to four inch flare yeah as mulch absolutely absolutely um yeah it'll decompose quicker it that's what the trees want that's what they're growing with out in out in their natural environment um we didn't talk about people often ask me about soil amendment um i rarely use soil amendment adding some compost to your backfill is is not a bad thing i mean you're adding organic matter it's going to help aerate the soil it's going to add some micronutrients compost generally isn't high in like nitrogen or it depends on the source but adding organic matter is fine that the one time i would really recommend adding it is if you have a really compacted soil if you're on a new home site your home was just built and all that equipment was there and you know they when they came in initially they skimmed off the topsoil they did all their work they drove all over then they took the topsoil pile and they you know after digging your foundation and spreading that subsoil around the property they put three inches of your topsoil back and grew grass in that case adding a lot of compost with your backfill and you got to go up to like 20 and 30 percent to really make a difference mix it in good with the backfill that's that's going to help you know adding fertilizers i'd never fertilize trees in their first year let them get established another thing that people ask about is do you prune at the time of planting when i was in college back in the day and that's how it makes me sound old you know conventional thinking used to be you buy a tree from a nursery that lost 75 percent or more of its root system at the time of digging boy you better prune some of the top compensate no what is every leaf on that tree doing in that first season it's it's feeding the tree right it's photosynthesizing it's feeding that root system helping the tree to get established the tree is going to react to losing 75 percent of its root system it's going to have smaller leaves it's not going to put out the growth it would have put out in the nursery it will adjust over time and it'll eventually regain that crown root to crown ratio that it had prior but i only only if something's dead disease damaged or you know broken would you take it off and i wouldn't prune for the first two three years anyway let the tree get established every leaf on the tree is is feeding the bigger the better the maltering the bigger the better in a perfect world every tree in a landscape i would have a maltering right out to the drip line of that tree but yeah um and then watering and watering is so key and it's throughout the establishment period which for some trees could be several years and even then if you have a drought a year water your trees i mean here i just got a hose running on this typically when i plant a tree you know in a landscape i run a hose out there and i put it on a trickle and i just let it be a slow soaking over time and you want to wet the soil outside of where that root ball is but you want to put it right there because until that tree puts roots out into the surrounding soil it's getting its moisture just from that root ball so you know know your soils obviously if you're on a on a more clay soil that holds a lot of moisture you don't have to put as much water on Margaret i think mentioned earlier about the watering bags that you see around burlington that is a great way to water the reason being is that twofold you you you know the amount of water you're given to the tree the gator bags that we use at branch out burlington bought for us are 20 gallons they zip around the tree you stick a hose in the hole in the top you fill it up and it drains over the course of about five six hours it's a little pinholes in the bottom so it's a slow soaking if you went out and tried to put 20 gallons of water on a tree with your hose on full blast what happens yeah a puddle in the street how do you know how much you put on to start with and most of it's just running off so those watering bags are key if you're if you plan on planting some trees this spring i believe branch out burlington has them for sale all the proceeds go to margaret's retirement fund isn't that right great way to water trees how much water a tree of this size two two to two and a half inch 15 to 20 gallons a week of course depending on your soils but depending on if what we're getting for rain now people will see these flash downpours for 10 minutes oh my god it rained so much you know how much rain we got tenth of an inch so use some common sense but throughout the establishment period and right we water trees here in burlington right up till i think we took the bags off in early october i want them going into the winter fully hydrated so um we we only put gator bags on tree so we're planting in burlington spring and fall now so we planted about 185 trees last fall and we'll be doing another 200 little over 200 this spring so all of those will get gator bags the fall planted from the previous year and and the spring planted throughout that first growing season we have not gone back and put bags on ones we did two years ago although when i'm out watering like last year i did hit some trees from the year before because we did have a dry spell early on that was getting a little nervous but hopefully they're well established enough and with a layer of wood chips and you know it just gets to the point where it's just impossible for us we're planting a lot of trees but we we try to stay ahead of them but in your home landscape water those trees in 10 years from now if we get in a bad drought put a put a hose out there put a sprinkler give it a good soaking it doesn't have to be every week all the time but just to get it through those driest periods for sure it'd probably equal about an inch inch inch and a half i i don't know exactly the nice thing is it's just that slow soaking so it's slow enough that the water you know even in a in a heavier soil it's going to have time to drain it's not going to sit there so yeah what about those drip holes yeah those can work well too yeah it's just like a yeah drip drip line or i don't know what are the other names for it drip drip irrigate yeah you can put put that hose around it's got little pinhole it's very low pressure and it's just the whole idea is that slow even soaking so it really can get into that critical root zone should we stake trees not like that um so people always ask me should we stake trees i i don't like staking we we do stake all our young trees in burlington for a couple reasons they're we're planting on bare root but mostly because they're on the side they're between the sidewalk in the road there's a lot of foot traffic it's kind of a way of saying hey there's a newly planted tree here watch out for it you know some most of the trees even the bare root ones if they're planted properly they're pretty sturdy in the ground they will shift a little over time if you're in a high wind area or if you're planting a tree with a shallow root system or it was a little loose in the root ball yeah sure stake stake your trees um use a good stout hardwood stake keep it out pounded in outside of where the outside edge of that root ball is get it in there enough so it's good and sturdy you run a wire from the stake around the tree but not around the tree just around one side and something to protect the tree from the wire because this is what can happen so we've we've used old garden hose we now thanks to branch out burlington they bought all these tree straps for us they're a nylon strap they come 12 to 18 inches they got a grommet on both sides they're about an inch to an inch and a half wide they're they're easy on the trunk of the tree you put them around you run the wire through and those do really well you don't want that thing piano string tight you want the tree to have some movement you just what you're doing by staking is keeping it from blowing over but actually that that movement has been shown to stimulate root growth if you if you go down by the lake and you see that on the look on the prevailing wind side of the trees on the northwest side or west side you'll see more of a pronounced root flare and big buttress roots that's in reaction to that tree being pounded by wind all the time over time that root system built up on that side so if you're going to stake trees we the trees that we plant in town they're even we put in ones last fall they'll remain staked until this coming fall and the ones we put in the spring typically for a full season and then we take them off in the fall sometimes I'll have to go back and put in a single stake if a tree got hit by somebody or vandalized or that's a whole other story but but um so I'm going to wrap it up here with you know oh really important too and I didn't mention this at the beginning so how many times have you gone to the garden center in the spring and you go to buy plants and you're all excited oh I'm going to buy my vegetable plants and my flowers maybe a few shrubs and a tree and you do it late on a Saturday afternoon and then you come home you're like oh something came up I got to go here and then they sit there and they sit beside your driveway and then Sunday comes along something comes up and right and stuff sit there and then it's compromised really important from the time you get that tree till you put it in the ground that you care properly care for it if you're not going to plant it right away keep it well watered don't leave it out on the pavement of your driveway roasting and 140 degree heat coming off the pavement um really important that step is really really important and absolutely critical if you're planting bare root trees because those roots without any soil around them in a matter of minutes can dry out and be done it's all your stored energy those are the roots that are going to uptake water nutrients so proper moisture so we pick the right species for the right place we pick out a good plant from the garden center we care for it on the way home and before we plant it we go through this whole process and we make sure we're planting at the right depth in the proper soil backfill good aftercare we don't do this and this is my and this is my mulch meter I mean I finally I got a yard stick I don't know if you can see here 14 inches of mulch and probably the next year they went put three more on it and if we do all that and we care for these trees down the road and we help them through the tough times we'll be planting trees for posterity for the next generation so over here is a this is the bare root tree planting video that we did and it's pretty entertaining it's it's worth watching if you're into it and go ahead this mulching material didn't know what to mulch it but what happened was I created a home for gold no yeah and in the spring the roots kind of come inside hang out in there yeah there's a safe place to live so what I did was I had to pull it ate the whole thing and it was a pretty warm winter they were hungry they were I've never had to stay on the floor so it's kind of anything but the other one what I did was I took the hardware block and I dug it down to protect the other one right over mulch away from that yeah and I actually didn't use that landscape background that one that one didn't fit that yeah that one so another reason not over mulch is to avoid the road because I assume we're going in the road it's like a shelter I would think so you must have uh critters that would grow an old tree yeah especially in yeah we don't see it on the streets but if you have trees in your backyard or close to unmold areas or wooded areas yeah that's good point protection in the winter for what's that tree tree guards that wrap around like you said you can use hardware cloth you want to go you know 18 inches to two feet up the tree but but rabbits too will girdle they'll eat that outer bark and then you're done so I'll take any other questions and then yeah um I don't want to go down the house yeah uh they were telling me you were just there yeah recently saying they had to take down their great big beautiful tree and the replacement he suggested was a sycamore tree so I was curious you didn't want another maple tree going in there is there something was it just to have a different tree or are you not figuring out the good environment anymore um I don't I'm not planting sugar maples anywhere be honest with you the long-term prognosis for sugar maples with a changing climate is not good in in any urban environment and especially on a property like that where there's a lot of activity outside there in the summer around the root system of that tree sugar maples are they're like the canary in the coal mine of trees they are hyper sensitive to soil compaction road salt pollution um high temperatures they're just they don't like it and not only that there are other sugar maples still on the property so in the interest of diversifying putting a fast growing species there that's going to be really interesting have you seen big old sycamores and what they look like we thought it was a great choice for the site um you know we could go with a number of things there but diversification is key too well you know the other thing about sugar maple you know we talked about the compaction everything it's a shallow rooting tree yeah so whatever happens um close to the surface um the the roots are impacted by it that's why compaction that's why sometimes um uh changing drought is a problem and also salt and changing grades at all I mean sugar maples are so temperamental they're so temperamental and we're only only if something's dead disease damaged or you know broken would you take it off and I wouldn't prune for the first two three years anyway let the tree get established every leaf on the tree is is feeding the bigger the better the multering the bigger the better in a perfect world every tree in a landscape I would have a multering right out to the drip line of that tree but yeah um and then watering and watering is so key and it's throughout the establishment period which for some trees could be several years and even then if you have a drought year water your trees I mean here I just got a hose running on this typically when I plant a tree you know in a landscape I run a hose out there and I put it on a trickle and I just let it be a slow soaking over time and you want to wet the soil outside of where that root ball is but you want to put it right there because until that tree puts roots out into the surrounding soil it's getting its moisture just from that root ball so you know know your soils obviously if you're on a on a more clay soil that holds a lot of moisture you don't have to put as much water on Margaret I think mentioned earlier about the watering bags that you see around Burlington that is a great way to water the reason being is that twofold you you you know the amount of water you're given to the tree the gator bags that we use at branch out Burlington bought for us are 20 gallons they zip around the tree you stick a hose in the hole in the top you fill it up and it drains over the course of about five six hours it's a little pinholes in the bottom so it's a slow soaking if you went out and tried to put 20 gallons of water on a tree with your hose on full blast what happens yeah puddle in the street how do you know how much you put on to start with and most of it's just running off so those watering bags are key if you're interested if you plan on planting some trees this spring I believe branch out Burlington has them for sale all the proceeds go to Margaret's retirement fund isn't that right great way to water trees how much water a tree of this size two two to two and a half inch 15 to 20 gallons a week of course depending on your soils but depending on if what we're getting for rain now people will see these flash downpours for 10 minutes oh my god it rained so much you know how much rain we got tenth of an inch so use some common sense but throughout the establishment period and right we water trees here in Burlington right up till I think we took the bags off in early October I want them going into the winter fully hydrated so we we only put gator bags on tree so we're planting in Burlington spring and fall now so we planted about 185 trees last fall and we'll be doing another 200 little over 200 this spring so all of those will get gator bags the fall planted from the previous year and the spring planted throughout that first growing season we have not gone back and put bags on ones we did two years ago although when I'm out watering like last year I did hit some trees from the year before because we did have a dry spell early on I was getting a little nervous but hopefully they're well established enough and with a layer of wood chips and you know it just gets to the point where it's just impossible for us we're planting a lot of trees but we we try to stay ahead of them but in your home landscape water those trees in 10 years from now if we get in a bad drought put a put a hose out there put a sprinkler give it a good soaking it doesn't have to be every week all the time but just to get it through those driest periods for sure it probably equal about an inch inch and a half I don't know exactly the nice thing is it's just that slow soaking so it's slow enough that the water you know even in a in a heavier soil it's going to have time to drain it's not going to sit there so yeah yeah those can work well too yeah it's just like a um yeah drip drip line or I don't know what are the other names for drip irrigate yeah you can put put that hose around it's got little pin holes very low pressure and it's just the whole idea is that slow even soaking so it really can get into that critical root zone should we stake trees not like that um so people always ask me should we stake trees I I don't like staking we we do stake all our young trees in Burlington for a couple reasons we're planting them bare root but mostly because they're on the side they're between the sidewalk in the road there's a lot of foot traffic it's kind of a way of saying hey there's a newly planted tree here watch out for it you know some most of the trees even the bare root ones if they're planted properly they're pretty sturdy in the ground they will shift a little over time if you're in a high wind area or if you're planting a tree with a shallow root system or it was a little loose in the root ball yeah sure stake stake your trees use a good stout hardwood stake keep it out pounded in outside of where the outside edge of that root ball is get it in there enough so it's good and sturdy you run a wire from the stake around the tree but not around the tree just around one side and something to protect the tree from the wire because this is what can happen so we've we've used old garden hose we now thanks to branch out Burlington they bought all these tree straps for us they're nylon strap they come 12 to 18 inches they got a grommet on both sides they're about an inch to an inch and a half wide they're they're easy on the trunk of the tree you put them around you run the wire through and those do really well you don't want that thing piano string tight you want the tree to have some movement you just what you're doing by staking is keeping it from blowing over but actually that that movement has been shown to stimulate root growth if you go down by the lake and you see that on the look on the prevailing wind side of the trees on the northwest side or west side you'll see more of a pronounced root flare and big buttress roots that's in reaction to that tree being pounded by wind all the time over time that root system built up on that side so if you're going to stake trees we the trees that we plant in town they're even we put in ones last fall they'll remain staked until this coming fall and the ones we put in the spring typically for a full season and then we take them off in the fall sometimes I'll have to go back and put in a single stake if a tree got hit by somebody or vandalized or that's a whole other story but so I'm going to wrap it up here with you know oh really important too and I didn't mention this at the beginning so how many times I've begun to the garden center in the spring and you go to buy plants and you're all excited oh I'm going to buy my vegetable plants and my flowers maybe a few shrubs and a tree and you do it late on a Saturday afternoon and then you come home you're like oh something came up I got to go here and then they sit there and they sit beside your driveway and then Sunday comes along something comes up and right and stuff sit there and then it's compromised really important from the time you get that tree till you put it in the ground that you care properly care for it if you're not going to plant it right away keep it well watered don't leave it out on the pavement of your driveway roast in in 140 degree heat coming off the pavement really important that step is really really important and absolutely critical if you're planting bare root trees because those roots without any soil around them in a matter of minutes can dry out and be done it's all your stored energy those are the roots that are going to uptake water nutrients so proper moisture so we pick the right species for the right place we pick out a good plant from the garden center we care for it on the way home and before we plant it we go through this whole process and we make sure we're planting at the right depth in the proper soil backfill good aftercare we don't do this and this is my and this is my mulch meter I mean I finally I got a yardstick I don't know if you can see here 14 inches of mulch and probably the next year they went put three more on it and if we do all that and we care for these trees down the road and we help them through the tough times we'll be planting trees for posterity for the next generation so over here is a this is the bare root tree planting video that we did and it's pretty entertaining it's it's worth watching if you're into it and go ahead and okay I'm gonna put that plant as a pattern I put down the this mulch and material didn't no one mulch it but what happened was I created a home for gold no yeah and in the spring I'm inside hanging out in there yeah okay there's a safe place to live so what I did was I had to pull it ate the whole thing and it was a pretty warm winter they were hungry they were I've never had to stay on the floor so it's kind of anything but the other one what I did was I took the hard work block and I dug it down to protect the other one right over mulch away from that yeah and I actually didn't use that landscape ground around that one that one did get affected yeah that one so another reason not over mulch is to avoid the roads I assume we go in the roads like a shelter I would think so you must have uh critters that would grow an old tree or yeah especially in yeah we don't see it on the streets but if you have trees in your backyard or close to unmold areas or wooded areas yeah that's a good point protection in the winter for what that tree tree guards that wrap around like you said you can use hardware cloth you want to go you know 18 inches to two feet up the tree but but rabbits too will girdle they'll eat that out or bark and then you're done so I'll take any other questions and then yeah um I don't know if you're at the bottom of the house yeah uh they were telling me you were just there yeah recently saying they had to take down their great big beautiful trees and the replacement you suggested was a sycamore tree so I was curious you didn't want another maple tree going in there is there something it was it just to have a different tree or are you not figuring it's a good environment anymore um I don't I'm not planting sugar maples anywhere be honest with you the long-term prognosis for sugar maples with a changing climate is not good in in any urban environment and especially on a property like that where there's a lot of activity outside there in the summer around the root system of that tree sugar maples are they're like the canary in the coal mine of trees they are hyper sensitive to soil compaction road salt pollution um high temperatures they're just they don't like it and not only that there are other sugar maples still on the property so in the interest of diversifying putting a fast growing species there that's going to be really interesting have you seen big old sycamores and what they look like we thought it was a great choice for the site um you know we could go with a number of things there but diversification is key too well you know the other thing about sugar maple you know we talked about the compaction everything it's a shallow rooting tree yeah so whatever happens um close to the surface um the the roots are impacted by it that's why compaction is amazing that's why sometimes um uh changing drought is a problem and also salt and changing grades at all i mean sugar maples are so temperamental they're so temperamental and what are you planting by the road for all these trees excuse me all these trees that you're planting in what do you mean you're planting by the road all kinds of different things we're diversifying as much as we can and i'll talk a little bit about that if there's if there's are there any more questions directly what do you think about river birches river birches have their place we're getting away from planting them anywhere out on the street they they're very fast growing they can be a really cool tree they tend to drop a lot of little twigs that drive people crazy i don't know why you pick up leaves you pick up all the other debris that falls and you know and you're recycling that blows down the street every day um but they're not they they have their place river birch have their place they're oh i've seen at the minnesota landscape arboretum river birch i don't know probably 70 years old i don't who knows they can grow a long time is it still worth the plan american beach i mean they take forever but um american beach is again not and it's a tough one they're tough to transplant unless it's done at a young age they're not very well suited like a sugar maple for for an urban environment or on somebody's lawn they can be a great tree they're really really affected all our beach in brahmat and you know i see it all over and in natural stands everywhere really prone to beach scale which is a piercing sucking insect that you'll see on the bark it's like this little white cottony looking stuff all over the bark very obvious and then that's followed up after they feed for a couple years by a nectria fungus and the combination you'll see the bark being all sort of dimpled black dimples and it leads to the decline of the trees over time and i beaches are in trouble and the few i've seen in burlington or even have a scale here so it's a tough one beautiful tree for sure but so um one thing so lots of you had really good questions about what kind of trees are planted here etc etc one of the great ways to learn a whole bunch more about these kind of things is to go help her out at the nursery i'll make a pitch for you don't worry you can get to know all the trees that will ultimately get planted on the street you can get to know them intimately by working in the nursery we're very mental in here with the Japanese beetles without traps and without spraying anything it's terrible can you make your own Japanese beetles come and Japanese beetles go and they're very spotty sometimes they can be really bad in one little neighborhood and then you won't see any in another neighborhood and they it's just sort of just a problem insect that's here to stay in fact really for me it's what they do in the grass or it's not what they do it's what the grubs well i don't care about the grub and look for the grub so there's no simple solution for a Japanese beetle will that prevent like the last time sharing from from brooding at some point if they've gained the leaves or that doesn't really hurt the tree um so i just i didn't point here sorry i got four trees from branch out for like two four years ago three autumn radiance maples they're doing beautifully and a lot of cherry super strong but the Japanese beetles descend on it they love the cherries yeah and they really they eat away the leaves on a tree that size i'd i'd go out there and get them off by hand or you can if you shake the tree okay put a tarp under the tree and shake it they'll all fall off you know how Japanese beetle you just touch it and it kind of falls eventually it'll still prove yeah i mean it you want to when it's a young tree you're gonna want to do as much as you can to protect it but again Japanese beetles usually they they'll be bad for a couple of years and then they're kind of cyclical for a while does that help at all if you if you have decent soil to begin with and you provide this good environment all that stuff's there or will be there i don't know just just general with the health of the trees right well there would be no point in putting nematodes unless you had an insect that you were trying to treat and even then i'm not sure how effective it would be in general okay and um what our question how big a tree can you transplant generally speaking that that species i mean they have moved trees on on large estates historic properties like massive oaks and massive maples using using cranes and especially i mean there's really no limit based on you know if you have a budget and equipment i i tell people you know i don't like planting trees bigger than two two and a half inch diameter if you're planting a bald and burlap tree when we had the whole debate over city hall park some people were saying oh we should be planting nine and ten inch maples no advantage because as i said you know they're losing so much of their root system and there's been studies people say a year per inch a caliber before that tree really you know starts to to uh get back to its previous root to crown ratio so if it's a 10 inch tree even if it's well cared for it can just sit there for years in the two inch tree it's going to get its feet under it and you know 15 years down the road you might not know the difference so there's really no advantage start with a smaller tree take good care of it it's much easier i have they i there was a guy from vermont who consulted on a project in georgia i think it was a golf course where they moved massive live oaks i mean massive you know two and three foot diameter trees i was mainly asking because i have a very close to my house and it's two books really and i'm afraid we had a lot of swirled rounds of great swirled runs up and down and jumping on the road and and how big in diameter is that oh that could be moved yeah could either be hand dug or um you could find somebody with a tree spade on a tractor you know if there's room they could went over in there yeah call dig safe okay might might be right over your gas line tree sale customers that are picking up trees this time okay so you will if you haven't already you will get an email that says when you should pick up the tree and um it's sort of staggered depending on your um your name your last name so good and you can watch that video and know that you're playing and then and and i've given this talk before and then i see people weeks later and they're like oh my god so many trees out there planted too deep there's no root flares anywhere and even landscapers have told me that oh my god i've gone back to jobs that we did 10 years ago i realized we've been doing this wrong all this time and when i'm quite honestly when i started in this business nobody was talking about planting depth nobody i don't know if they just we never heard about make sure that root flare now it's a big thing because we're seeing you know i went to school 35 years ago now we're seeing those trees dying and we have a lot of trees around burlington quite honestly in the green belts that were planted many years ago when we didn't we didn't know any better and you know after the loss of all the alms i think early on in bernie's bernie sanders tenure there was some big tree planting efforts and they got a bunch of community members involved and a lot of volunteers out there which is great but there wasn't a lot of oversight and so a lot of these trees got planted too deep and we're dealing with it now we see it it's um some certain species norway maple lindens oftentimes alms can be really prone to that girdling root scenario and so we keep them as long as we can and then time comes take them down and we replant um there's one other tree sale thing some of you may have gotten peach trees through our tree sale in the past and um there is a fungus that um peach leaf growth that is a common problem on some varieties of peaches and now is the time to spray those trees with a copper solution if um if in the past you've seen that your leaves kind of all curled up and it's got sort of splotchy and red it's better to treat now it will i i do it on my own peaches and that those seem to help quite a bit and if you have more questions you're welcome to let me know so yeah yeah yeah yeah the tree the tree or the tree yeah and the funny thing is you spray before you need to spray any of the label but um you spray before the buds begin to break so the fungus is kind of all around the um bud scales so but it's a very unsatisfying process to spray it looks like it's not getting on anything but um it's i have found that the point of fact is that it's just the same type of for the apple russ um sorry cedar apple russ yeah oh i don't know maybe i i i don't yeah i because i could never do it well there are natural products you can use to and i i can't tell you what they are but there are natural products out there that will do a pretty good job with cedar apple russ but it's all about the timing so the a lot of those fungus diseases it's all about temperatures and moisture and the timing so if you miss that initial infection you're you're trying to fight it the whole way well and and you can't fight with yeah with the peach and you can't fight right once it's once it's inoculated it's there yeah um and you don't want to spray after the flowers have started there are the buds have started growing so if there's no other questions go ahead it's on the branch out burlington website yes go to the branch out burlington website they have a link to it www branch out burlington.org we've been having a few issues with the server so hopefully it's fixed but um anyway but if you have a problem with email and all despite my technical challenges i will find somebody that knows the answer so if you're interested i'm in if you're not don't feel bad and get up and leave i'm gonna just talk a little bit about what have we been doing over the last since i've been here in burlington what are our major challenges what we've been doing if you're interested yes no tree house this down here yeah hopefully i don't know if you mentioned it earlier i think does that putting those bolts into that type of a tree is that not orbit or not orbit but well any any womb to a tree is a potential opening for some organism some fungus some you know to get in there and start causing decay it's not not a great thing but we actually intentionally install hardware and trees around town to mitigate structural issues in the tree we go down to the waterfront the LA of heading north from the echo center on the bike path the LA of those silver lindens two years ago we went and put brace rods and all we drilled through and put three quarter inch threaded rod because they have such terrible structure that we were afraid a big storm was going to come across the lake and just tear those trees apart so there's a ton of hardware in there we put cables and trees trees will grow right around it and be fine so yeah so as i said i've been in burlington four years um i started in late february of 2018 right at the time that the debate was heating up over city hall park i was like thrown into the middle of this whole debate like you within six weeks of starting this job emerald ash borer was first detected in the state so i'm like oh great we got emerald ash borer in city hall park um so that you know emerald ash borer has had a immense impact all across country it's now in 39 states if you don't know the history it started in the midwest it supposedly came in on the wood of packing crates or pallets this beetle came in and was transported and the story goes on it's now here in vermont it will have a significant impact to our urban tree canopy thank you john john was my tech guy he's one of our parks planners i don't do tech so i'm like help me um anyway um significant impact to burlington we currently manage i have a crew of four full-time certified arborists that work with me we've got a full complement of equipment we do all our work in house removals pruning planting we also take care of all the landscape beds and everything in all the park spaces and we manage about 13 000 trees that's all the trees and right of ways between the sidewalk and the road all throughout the town and then all of our managed park spaces meaning the mode areas of the parks where you see planted trees and three cemeteries of those approximately 13 000 trees there's about 1100 green or white ash both which are susceptible to that insect so it's like nine and a half percent about 925 of those when i started our green belt trees so i'm like oh great i knew emerald ash borer was coming but i'm like we gotta we gotta start being proactive here what are we gonna do well your options are remove the trees now remove the trees when the insect gets here treat or treat to protect against the insect treatment involves the injection of an insecticide in the tree every two to three years for the foreseeable future emerald ash borer is not going anywhere fast it's a huge expense um conservatively so my predecessor had come up with an emerald ash borer they called it an emerald ash borer management plan but it wasn't really a plan it talked about where the ash were in the city what were the relative costs to remove replace tree you know what were the costs at the time what if we did this much of a percent but it never really said when it gets here this is what we're gonna do so to me that's what a plan is so i didn't really have a plan i had a lot of good information to work from so all of our inventory trees are kept on an inventory software called tree words so i'd go into my office and i can say oh you live on buell street 52 buell street oh you have a ornamental pear growing there and it's this size and the last time we pruned it was boom boom boom we keep all that information so i went in there immediately and said okay where's all our ash trees i was pretty familiar with burlington but not that familiar so i identified all the areas where there were ash in the city particularly in green belts and i drove around started looking at them what i found was in a lot of areas we had ash trees growing um in the spacing between the ash allowed for us to start planting in between and i thought whoa maybe this isn't a challenge maybe this is an opportunity let's get in there and start planting now with a wide diversity of species because in my mind treating wasn't an option 26 percent of our green belt ash reside in one neighborhood in the new north end out at apple tree point that development was built like in the early 80s there's about five roads through there and the developer essentially lined both sides of every street with ash so just that neighborhood conservatively speaking would be 30 to 40 thousand dollars every two years to treat to maintain a monoculture that could be susceptible to some other disease and there are other problems with that so i didn't i was like that's not a viable option i'm not taking that much of a chunk of our budget every year to inject insecticides not to mention the and burlington that might stir up a little hubbub what are you putting on that tree my dog licks around there my kids play here right i didn't even want to go there so we just started identifying these areas and inter planting you will see this in that neighborhood you'll see it on upper college street south wanooski ab east ab man's field that everywhere that we could plant a new tree next to an existing ash in the south end we've got ferguson and lineman street and south wind condo development off of flinab and to date we have already planted replacement for almost 65 percent of our green belt ash with a whole variety of species so for me it was a the opportunity to further diversify our canopy because guess what there's something else coming right there was the dutch elm disease there's emerald ash borer there was the chestnut blight back in the early 1900s that wiped out all the american chestnuts there's oak will on the horizon that's been found in western new york state there's so diversity is key so that's one big thing we've been doing prior to my coming to the city the the city was planting trees in the spring only and their primary pretty much their only source for trees was the branch out burlington nursery which was great great relationship you know they they raised money in the tree sale they fund all everything that goes into the nursery as far as irrigation and the grow bags that we put them in and they supply the volunteer labor but the city was planting about 120 to 140 trees a year in every any year i can look back at our inventory and tell you that well the problem was that that's just about keeping pace with our natural attrition from removals storm damage vehicle strikes vandalism you know construction infrastructure work that compromises the tree and it's got to come down or just not trees die so we were removing almost that many trees a year so we had no net gain so i thought we really got to up our game here how are we going to do that and do it with the same budget same amount of people we got to plant more efficiently so one thing we did was i approached branch out burlington i said hey you got more space up there let's expand the nursery let's get more trees out of there so over the last three years we've we've expanded that nursery almost half again at size so in the coming years instead of getting 150 trees we should be over 200 so that'll be good the other thing we did was and and my predecessor never did this and i don't know why but i i started researching let's plant trees bear root back in the day when the city did all this tree planting under bernie sanders after the alms went away they bought bald and burlap trees so they had volunteers out wrestling these things around and you needed equipment you had to dig huge holes and you can only put so many on a truck and try getting around burlington with a truck and a trailer and a tractor so i started prior to the advent of the tree spade to dig that way that's how nursery sold trees back in the day horsefords nursery back their oldest nursery in vermont you ordered your trees they dug them up bear root in the spring you went and got them you put them in the ground so it's a great way to dig to transplant trees you get more of the root system how we can we can carry i can carry four in each hand and walk down the street with them so i had met a researcher from cornell university years ago and heard her talk about bear root tree planting and she's one of the top researchers in urban forestry so i contacted her and they've been planting trees in ithica new york with cornell university using this bear root method so she gave me all this information she hooked me up with the nursery in western new york state that specializes in digging these trees and shipping them bear root so they dipped the root system in a polymer and so the other thing i said wait a minute falls great time to plant we're really busy in the spring we're having to clean up all the park spaces besides let's plant both spring and fall we can double what we're planting right we can make the season longer and we can use bear root trees so all that said and we started targeting you know in the past they would plant you know two trees over here and one over here and they'd go up bule street and luma street and they'd see an opening they'd plant one tree when there were six openings on the street i'm like well wait that's not very efficient we're going up that street we're going to plant every available spot on the street so doing all that we and not spending any more money or hiring any more people last year this past calendar year we planted four hundred and seventy five trees the year before that we were at about four thirty five the year before that we were at like three seventy six so we really upped our game the other thing i'll tell you is you know just overall what is the state of burlington's urban forest um municipalities across country are losing urban canopy at an alarming rate like double digits over the last 10 years about 15 years ago the city of burlington got a grant from the urban and community forestry program of the state to hire the spatial analysis lab at uvm to do a first of its kind urban tree canopy study of the city so they flew over with drones with lidar like a high tech radar and looked at the total land mass of burlington in the summer that's private land public land streetscape everything what percentage of burlington's total land mass is covered in tree canopy and at the time they found it was 38 percent which is really good when you compared all their communities of course we have some big conserved forested areas and anyway three years ago we got another grant from the urban community forestry department to to do this again so a decade had passed so we hired the uvm spatial analysis lab they did a flyover their their technology is a little better these days but they found about a four percent increase in burlington's overall tree canopy even though we weren't really adding more trees to our inventory and we attribute that to the fact that we have a great program to support the trees we do have we take care of them so all these trees that have been planted over the last decade have now really grown and it was really cool because you could look at sections of the city from the 10 years like this park and well these trees were tiny they barely showed up and now there's these canopies so we are trending in the right direction and we're really psyched about that because that is not the case nationwide um the other thing that this study did was they they really broke down this all the data and they showed us like what percentage of public land private land and you know we don't really have control over people's private properties but we do over the public land so they broke it down by ward there's eight wards in the city and what we found was that there was a big disparity in the new north end and in the south end we had tree canopies of 38 44 45 percent and some of those wards you got bigger private properties bigger yards more trees on private land we've got the wooded areas of you know leddie park and ethan allen park and all the corridor along the bike path and that makes a big difference but in the downtown core in the old north end where you have tighter properties you know little postage stamp not a lot of private trees no front lawns to speak of a lot of those streets and no trees out front that those were the lowest the wards were the lowest percentage of canopy coverage so we're like okay over the next couple years this is where we're going to target so last spring i applied for a grant from the national arbor day foundation which we got for $20,000 and we identified all the available planting sites within our right of way and wards two and three and we planted them everywhere we could put a tree unless the homeowner came out said i don't want a tree there and believe me not everybody in burlington loves trees i don't know why but they think it's gonna fall on my house and i'm thinking how the hell do you not in your lifetime but i don't say anyway um so we've really had a you know a thoughtful method of how we're going about our planting in the city and it's made a huge difference so last spring we did wards two and three because those were the lowest canopy coverage and then in the fall we did ward eight which is a little sliver up by the campus upper pearl street and this spring we're focusing on wards five and six although we are doing some plantings in other wards and then this fall we'll move up north ab if you've noticed north ab like north of uh the high school there's a big stretch up there where there's not a lot of greenbelt trees so we're really trying to focus let's let's plant trees everywhere we've got space within the public right away you know some of our park spaces you know like water front park parks have different uses so you know waterfront park you're not going to fill that whole open green space with trees because that's where you have your big events that's where you have your concerts in your fourth of july celebration and your kids day festival and so that's kind of where we're at in the city we're we're really charged up we have this great relationship with branch out burlington margaret drives me nuts but that's okay i tolerate it and um last year i think we planted two i think we figured that 47 percent of our trees in the calendar year actually came from the nursery and just to give you an idea how cool that nursery has been i looked it up yesterday um about 1400 more than 1400 trees that are planted in burlington out of our 13 000 came started in that nursery so that's that's significant and in in the coming year is going to be more because as i said we expanded it so do you the trees you're planting you're not doing like a big shade tree anymore i'm not doing like a full load of the down tree or anything we are the problem is in burlington throughout much of the city what's on one side of the road overhead utilities and so you saw that photo back in the day nobody thought to look up and so these trees got planted and we have to carve out the center because our crew does all the line clearing work for burlington electric we do a contract with them every year my guys are just finishing that up so now on on that on the side of the street with overhead utilities we're only planting species that don't achieve heights of more than 25 maybe 30 feet and it's not a lot of species we don't have a big palette of species but anywhere where we've got the green belt to support it in the open space above we're planting elms maples oaks sycamores london plane tree katalpa i mean some of these trees are going to get giant so yes we want canopy the one other thing i'll mention that burlington has invested a lot in and you will see moving forward was you've all seen those two blocks of st paul street that were rebuilt a couple years ago so probably six seven years ago now the city of burlington adopted new standards called the great street standards for streetscapes in that downtown core if we're going to rebuild the street you know we're going to have standards for the paving bicycles trash receptacles lighting uh bike lanes rain garden storm green storm water infrastructure because we all know the problem with burlington's combined sewer and storm water and the fact that the city's most of it's built on a hill heading down till towards the lake so so the city invested a lot of money and if you go up st paul street the trees that you see that appear to be in a standard tree grate in the sidewalk like you see on main street and church street there's actually the soil cells they call them silva cells underneath the pervious papers and both directions out so we're providing in some cases up to 1800 cubic feet of soil per tree and there's been studies to show a tree that grows to a medium size at maturity or a large size of maturity what's the minimum soil volume and needs to achieve that so it's deceiving because what you're seeing is you know looks like a standard tree grate and if you walk up main street around the corner by the flin theater you'll see honey locus planted in a four by four cutout in the sidewalk and that is all the soil they have to both sides is compacted road base go ahead right so that's a good question so the soil that went in there was was imported so it was and it had to meet certain standards certain percent of compost and and there still is debris filtering in to those tree grates there's leaves there's debris breaking down over time and and the pavers the brickwork that's around those areas is pervious too so the rain water can go down in so that is a good question but you know trees in our green belts are deprived of nutrients and soil volume they've only gotten so much room there right so that's big um and now burlington just at the past town meeting voted to use tax increment financing funds to do this rebuild the main street from south union street to battery which will be doing the same thing it'll look much like st paul street there will be rain gardens will be capturing storm water the big trees that you see along that stretch like those those western two most blocks will go away and there will be trees planted in these rain garden settings and in these soil cells for the future if you've ever noticed that that last block on the south side of main street heading towards battery is all ash trees which are going to go away anyway on the opposite side of the street and that in that western most block are some big old lindens the one's closest to battery street we lost two in a storm a couple years ago the ones uphill are declining because the green belt there is heavily compacted because of the parking configuration so all that gets addressed in this new concept and then when and if the hole in the mall is ever constructed the street surrounding that will get the same sort of treatment so that's a big commitment because you know otherwise where do you put trees in the downtown core there's very few green spaces there's no private lots there's no green space to grow trees so do you folks plant the shrubs and the bushes too so same paul street the trees were planted by a contractor i oversaw that tree planting but our parks department took on the planting of those rain gardens the upkeep of them right now is under contract with a with a maintenance company well i'm in general throughout you know like at the waterfront oh we do all that we do all the landscaping too it's so beautiful the waterfront i got a couple days to be good yeah when they start flowering you know the rhododendron this is unbelievable it's just breathtaking it's that beautiful i think and so city hall park we did all in house too that was not the intention at the beginning of that project but because of the delays and everything it drove the costs up and so we really wanted to move forward so yeah so how do you feel about city hall park now i think it's a huge improvement i mean it for me that space was absolutely depressing to walk into you know 35 40 percent of the soil was compacted like concrete yeah a lot of not all the trees i mean we did take down some perfectly healthy trees no question about it but we did that to make room for better infrastructure for dealing with the storm water on the site so to me those were trade-offs i could stomach for the long term you know prior to the renovation there was the only flowers in there were some annuals that we used to plant on the corners there wasn't a flowering shrub there wasn't a perennial there's 3500 perennials and grasses in there now there's over 400 shrubs i mean if you walk down that main street stretch when it's all in flower look at the butterflies and bees it's it's it's back to life so we do not plant any i since i've been here we haven't planted any in obviously in the streetscapes it's an issue because of sight lines yeah like if you're pulling out of a driveway you can't see the kid on a bike and in the park spaces you know the evergreens it can be some issues with safety quite honestly you know i mean people camp out under things go down and look in those rhododendrons you'll find more campsites so all those major constructions i'm round about yeah round and around up there yeah a lot of condensers for me but anyway oh you're that person so all the places they dug up there's going in lots of rocks and gravel and then handing it down how is a tree you promise you can promise so so right now all the work that's being done up there is on underground utilities so there was the i saw a map of what was underground there it's absolutely insane water lines sewer lines gas line and just a spider web network so they had to deal with all that underground infrastructure and as obviously a lot of that's going to get paved over margaret so if you don't compact as you backfill it you when you go to pave that five and ten years down the road it's going to be sinking when new so those roads uh south willard street and what is it south wanouski there's going to be a little bit of a realignment there like the road is getting shifted a little so when they get to that point the green belt where trees will be planted there are specs that that gets dug out and replaced with good soil to a depth of four feet i've seen all the specs and there there will be a ton of replanting a lot of trees went away along that stretch but you know those plans have been in the works for long before i came here i didn't even get to weigh in on a mother then um tree species that'll go in there after the fact so you know there's always in an urban environment there's always this juggling of needed infrastructure housing i mean it's a big issue we need more housing in brillington where are you going to put it there's a lot down the road here a wooded lot and people are going to fit you can't cut down those trees and build how we're going to put houses you either go up right and people complain about the height of buildings or you build on a you know vacant lots it's got to go somewhere or i don't know what the answer is but it's it's a constant battle we're constantly fighting you know sidewalk replacement work waterline work that's impacting our right-of-way trees and we do the best we can to try to work around it and save what we can but do you work on the long riverside avenue with your religion and stuff well i haven't done anything there but that bank going to the river it's pretty sketchy over the years i mean back in the day stuff was dumped over there and there's rotting debris and timbers and yeah some some morning somebody could wake up riverside ab could be in the river do you do anything in wanooski or do you have a counterpart in wanooski that uh no we don't do anything in wanooski the only three towns cities in in bremont that have a full-time city arborist are burlington south burlington and rutherland and south burlington and rutherland do not have a fully staffed crew and budget like we have here in burlington and if you're a burlington resident whether you know it or not a portion of your taxes that residents voted on many years ago there is a dedicated tax for our greenways so like one quarter of one cent or whatever it is from your taxes goes directly into my budget to help take care of our green infrastructure yeah that's a really good question so my policy since i've been here is that i want to see a new tree go in where one was removed within a calendar year unless it was never a good viable site to begin with and the tree never should have been planted there one issue that so so we've been doing that for the most part i mean a lot of the trees on our planting list this spring that are not in the wards forum five that we're concentrating on are going in where we took out trees in the last calendar year one of the problems we run into there's a lot of stuff underground so in neighborhoods where there's houses in relatively close proximity and driveways in between you don't have a lot of green space there and if there was an existing tree where does the water main come into the house and where's the shut off and where's the gas line sometimes there is no other place to put a tree once we dig safe it and even like with stumps of larger trees even if you have that stump ground down they can't go down deep enough to actually plant another tree on top until that decays enough to the point many many years the city does not own a stump grinder they're a very very expensive piece of machinery they used to rent one out once a year or every other year and it was very inefficient way to grind stumps we two years ago we did a contract with we put it out to bid and we had somebody go around and grind all our stumps now we have a backlog again and i've talked to when we put it out to bid we sent it out to seven companies and only one even bid on it because it's a pain to go around the city of burlington and park equipment nobody wanted to do it and burlington's a tough city to work in let's face it so now we have a backlog of stumps again that we need to get ground and i talked to the same company and they're like yeah we'd love to do it but we've got a backlog of our own so it's kind of a dilemma for us but we're you know i was out marking tree planting sites today where we'll be planting offsetting an existing stump by six or eight feet and we can get a tree in there and you know the stump may be there for a while but we do the best we can so i don't know if we spoke about this already but how about utilizing uh the flat roofs you know more and encouraging that you know i don't expect you folks like green green roofs yeah that's a big thing but the building has to be constructed from day one to support that it's a huge amount of weight it's a special membrane it's a pretty complicated process yeah i i i'm not sure but according to people that were i saw on tv a couple of times there's ways to mitigate that weight problem and so a lot of the you know a lot of thoughts about how well we get through that year because it's you know way too much of a lot of that can be mitigated i say so that and i don't know you know when you down here and uh you know i mean i'm not talking about gigantic you know oak or something but you know certainly bigger bushes and shrubs and things like that can be can be used i bet maybe me right they they do require some maintenance yeah yeah uh So I'm sitting here thinking about how fortunate a building is to have your department and one of the one of the departments have an open business right about all of your stuff. And it's great, you know what I'm saying? I live in New Jersey, it's a good issue. And I'm really scared, I'm so scared that if we do the whole of Main Street with the ground about, I'll get physical for sure on it. I am scared to death about it because then you know when, because it's going to look like it's going to be a long way. They're putting a building like right up, you know, like five feet from the roof. I just got word yesterday and I hope this happens but I got a call from the director of the Urban and Community Forestry Program for the state and I've known her a number of years and yeah. And she said that the governor's current budget has a bunch of money in there for tree planting. That's part of the state's climate action plan or whatever. So if that comes through, communities like Manuski that are doing these urban redos, there might be a lot of money available in the form of grants that aren't even going to be matching grants to pull off some of that work. Yeah, you got to plant them properly and you got to care for them. That's the key. I mean, you can plant all you want but if you don't have the follow-up maintenance and that's why I came into this job very fortunate that my predecessor, when he started here 37 years ago it was him. There was no crew, there was barely any and he built this department from the ground up and following the ice storm of 98 is when citizens realize holy mackerel. Our canopy means something and we got to take care of it and that's when you all voted to support this dedicated tax. And so with the reappraisals that just happened I just learned that we're getting an influx of money to our budget. My supervisor's like, you got to think about how you're going to spend that money. I said, don't worry, I got it covered. I thought that if you get a 50% of the fees you're going to get from your branch of budget. Right, and the rest we purchase and yeah, but we get the most for our dollar. And the other thing I want to tell you is between the trees that come from the nursery and the trees that we're planting bear root because we track this in our inventory we have a 98, 99% success rate. We lose almost no trees and we lose half a dozen a year to vandalism quite honestly these drunk college students pull them out of the ground or we had one get run over on North Ave I came in on a Sunday night a guy ran off the road, hit a telephone pole sheared it off on the way through took out one of the trees we planted last wall. I was so mad. I'm like, I don't care about the telephone pole. I hope the guy's all right, but he killed our tree and I was pissed. Talk to Sarah, George, a lot of those guys have to do community work for them on probation. And the residents can we report that you out for free? Yeah, I get calls all the time from residents saying I'm worried about the tree in front of my house. Can you take a look? I don't have it. Okay, where do you look? And we're on the utility side. I may be marking there. Did you get a notice in the mail that you're getting a tree for no? I know, we've been right in here with my stuff. Okay, so we're on South Union. We're going to be maple and king. I'm going to write it down. I don't have a pen. I don't need to tell you to write on your side. Between maple and king. Oh, we may be putting a few trees in there. That green belt is really narrow. And that, yeah, there's some areas that it's kind of on the cusp. I mean, it's like really narrow. Yeah, it's just, it's really tough to grow anything. Even the smaller stature trees in such a limited soil volume. We didn't really agree to do that. Yeah, and the other thing we've done over the years is, you know, there's some neighborhoods in the new North end that have some of these side streets where they have these 18 inch green belts and we've actually planted trees on front lawns instead. We call it an easement tree. We make a sign, a little agreement. And we're happy to do that because we want canopy. And if it makes more sense long-term, you know, if the tree in the 18 inch strip might grow five years and not do much and then die as opposed to having a front lawn to grow on and cascade out over the street and sidewalk, we'd much rather plant it there. Some of the, I guess, particularly for the mice we used to put in a much taller pole and raised all the way up. So that allows them to call a tree. Could, yeah. How many trees do they grow in different support? You know, it's funny, back a number of years ago the city did a climate action plan and it's stated in there, we'd like to have a urban tree canopy coverage of 50%. And I don't know if they stated a year. I mean, we're looking to increase. We will run out of spaces, available open spaces in the green belts because you wanna allow these things to have space between them to grow and we'll always be removing trees so we'll have those to replace. But again, the opportunities to increase canopy are gonna be on private properties. So encouraging people to put a tree in your yard if you got space in your backyard. So how many trees could it support? I don't know. It's funny that climate action plan said in order to achieve that goal, we would need to plant, and I remember this, 588 trees a year. And I'm like, where did they come up with that number? And I actually researched minutes of these meetings. I talked to people who were on the committee. I talked to my predecessor. Nobody knows where this number came from. And meanwhile, they were continuing to only plant 140, 130, 140 trees a year. So we're upping our game and doing what we can. But the other thing is we don't wanna plant more than we have the capacity to care for and get through that establishment period. Cause a lot of communities, they get all this funding and they get a bunch of volunteers, they get all excited and they put the trees in and there's no plan for ongoing maintenance. And that's a recipe for failure. So you're welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you.