Lawn struggles
Typically, when I show up at a new lawn care job, I walk the lawn to check for obstacles and hazards. One of these clients had a small struggling tree planted in the lawn; and if you read my blogs regularly you already know where this is heading.
Trees planted in lawns struggle with competition from the grass and therefore don’t always thrive. They will do fine but they may not thrive. It was definitely the case here. When I got close to the tree I could see bark injuries from line trimmers. Even if you’re careful, it’s likely you will slip up. I know this from experience.
Stress!
Every hit with a line trimmer or worse, mower, is a stressful injury requiring the tree to allocate precious resources for repairs. What we really want is for the tree to grow. Repeated weekly injuries will kill the tree.
So, I cut the lady’s grass and then went back to the tree. Since I don’t usually carry plastic tree guards with me, I grabbed an edging shovel (flat bottom) and I created a tree well around it. Those two items are recommended ways for protecting trees from lawn care machines. The third suggested item is what we’re doing with this blog post: education! Keep your machines away from trees!
Fall review
Now, the rest of the mowing season is a blur. I’m busy. But then the lady texted me in the fall saying how happy she was. The tree leafed out nicely, pushed out flowers so we could identify it properly as Sourwood (Oxydxendrum arboreum) and it produced beautiful fall colours. According to her text, this sourwood has never looked so good! Awesome.
This is a good example of using tree wells to keep lawn care machines away from tree bark. Tree wells also help the tree collect water and nutrients by pushing competing grass away. But by far the biggest benefit is eliminating the constant stress of getting hit by string trimmers.
If you have trees planted in your lawn definitely consider creating tree wells around them.
