Trees shade our picnics, hold our tire swings, and delight us by bursting into fantastic bloom every spring.
If they’re big enough, you can even hide behind them when that guy with the clipboard is walking toward your porch.
It takes years, even decades, for a great tree to mature, so when you suddenly see yours struggling, you worry.
How to tell if a tree is stressed? Maybe its leaves are suddenly smaller than normal, or the leaves have dead spots or are yellowing.
Maybe its branches are thinning, or the tips are dying. Or it seems to have stopped growing.
How do you save a stressed tree? Here are some treatments to help your tree recover.
1. Deep Root Fertilization for a Stressed Tree
How to get nurturing nutrients to your stressed tree ASAP? Go straight to its roots.
Deep root tree fertilization injects nutrients for your stressed tree directly deep into the soil, rather than spreading it over the top.
By injecting the fertilizer with high pressure, nutrients like phosphorus and iron can reach the deepest tree roots fast, feeding your tree from the roots up.
The fertilizer is delivered straight to the tree’s roots, with a long, cool-looking wand, so your tree gets an immediate nutrition boost.
Then, over time, the nutrients make their way to the rest of your tree, making it healthier and more vibrant.
That high pressure also helps aerate the soil and offers much-needed oxygen for the root system. Deep root fertilization is one of the best ways to save a stressed tree.
2. Tree Injections Can Save Stressed Trees
Tree injections are like shots for your trees. They deliver “medicine” to treat diseases and insects directly into your stressed tree.
It’s injected right into the tree trunk, then quickly taken up by the vascular system and distributed throughout the tree.
This direct treatment works faster and is more effective than spray treatments, which can take weeks to work.
Here in Idaho, these injections are often used for maple trees, which often have “iron chlorosis,” a nutrient deficiency. They can’t absorb all the nutrients they need from the soil. Affected trees have yellowing leaves that never quite get green.
It can affect aspens, too.
Tree injections deliver micro-nutrients directly into the stressed tree and quickly work to replenish it.
If insects are killing your tree, these injections can treat infestations of borers, aphids, spider mites, and scale.
While other types of treatment require three to four treatments, tree injections just require one, and lasts for a whole year.
3. Use Dormant Oil to Kill Bugs on Trees
Help prevent a stressed tree in the first place by killing damaging insects that love to lay eggs in your Idaho trees and shrubs.
They’ll lurk there all winter, then in spring, the new larvae will devour your precious trees.
Help save a tree with dormant oil.
Also called horticultural oil, dormant oil spray is a highly refined petroleum product used as an insecticide to suffocate insects and insect eggs that have overwintered on trees and shrubs.
Instead of poisoning the bugs, you’re basically smothering them with the oil. The oil kills any lingering insects as well as their eggs, so they won’t hatch in the spring.
Applying dormant oil for trees at the right time can help save a tree from significant damage.
Take Good Care of Your Idaho Trees
Proper care throughout the seasons will keep your trees healthy. Make sure they get water, fertilizer, and proper pruning. Keep your eye out for pests and diseases so you can catch them early.
Are Your Trees Ready for a New Best Friend?
Hoping to save a dying tree? Rescue your Idaho trees with restorative tree injections to banish bugs, treat diseases, or add nourishing nutrients to boost their health fast.
Expert plant health care like tree injections, deep root fertilization, and dormant oil treatments are available for our Idaho Falls and Boise customers who use our full-service lawn care program.
Choose an Idaho Falls or Boise professional lawn care service that bundles your yard’s most-needed treatments into one convenient, no-fuss plan.
Fertilizing, weed control, grub control. Done. Tree health care? Double done.
We’ve got your back.
Got a few minutes? That’s all you need to get started.
Fill out the form on this page.
Call us at (208) 656-913.
Or read more about our services.
Then kick back and relax in your healthy, thriving yard.
Image Source: aphids, tree injection
