Forestry and Trees

[Brad Mills, Program Host]
Nebraska Extension Almanac. Trees make our home landscapes more beautiful, help save energy with the shade they cast, and our home to a wide variety of wildlife and insects. And it's important to have a wide variety of shade trees, ornamental trees as well as under canopy smaller trees. Great Plains nursery owner, Heather Byers says, another benefit to having diverse trees is that if some new disease or insect pest comes along, your landscape won't suffer as much damage. She talks about the importance of tree diversity in the home landscape on today's almanac.

[Heather Byers, Great Plains Nursery Owner]
A healthy home landscape starts with a diverse canopy of trees, shrubs, and perennials.

Today we're going to talk about diversity in regards to trees.

The 1st thing to think about in regards to your trees is your large maturing shade trees.

Having one or two nice, large maturing shade trees on your property is essential.

Those are the trees that provide the most shade, giving energy savings, and also provide storm water mitigation.

They slow down wind, provide protection for your property.

You can also consider ornamental trees for your property.

Those add a lot of value with beauty, pollinators, pollinator habitat, oftentimes you can introduce different berries, and lots of great fall color.

And fall color is a wonderful addition for any sized tree.

And it's really fun to mix up the different species in regards to the habitat that you can create, and then all the different interests and textures that you can create for your yard.

Diversity of species is essential when it comes to being resilient against insect and disease pressures.

If something new moves in, be it, you know, most recently, we can remember Emerald Dashboard, Dutch elm disease, we don't know what's next on the horizon.

So by having a well diverse home landscape and community landscape, it sets yourself up for a much more resilient landscape that can withstand, and you're losing much less of your landscape.

So maybe you just lose one tree versus losing multiple trees on your property because of having a monoculture of trees.

That diversity is really key.

Something else to consider when choosing the right treats for your landscape would be focusing on our keystone species.

Those are our native plants that have evolved here within our eco region, and support the most insect in birds within our eco region.

So things like oaks, choke cherries, black cherries, plums, our native willows.

One of my favorites is prairie willows, which offer a smaller sized plant.

When it comes to choosing new plants for your home landscape, considered diversity with texture, color, and natives.

Another thing to consider when choosing new trees for your home landscape is the size of trees that you choose.

Young trees, in the size range of anywhere from one foot up to five to six, seven feet tall, are young trees, often within that three to four year old range.

And those have shown us time and time again that they transplant really well.

They can initiate new roots quickly, being a young tree, and that proves to have transplant success.

And long term viability and success within our landscape.

In any case, different varieties of trees will make your home more beautiful and vibrant, as well as avoiding some random disease and insect problems that could come up in the future.

[Brad Mills, Program Host]
Listings of good tree selections can be found at the Nebraska statewide arboretum website at plantnebraska.org. That's plantnebraska.org. For Nebraska Extension Almanac, I'm Brad Mills. Nebraska Extension Almanac is a production of IANR media, and Nebraska Extension. For more information on how your university is serving Nebraskans, go to extension.unl.edu.
 

[Brad Mills, Host]

Nebraska Extension Almanac. Dry weather this fall and winter may have some consequences in your home landscape this spring. Your trees, young and old, will need some extra attention, and that means getting some good water on them to help them thrive this spring. Nebraska extension instructor Dana Freeman talks about proper methods to get your trees, the water they need, on today's almanac.

[Dana Freeman, Nebraska Extension Instructor]

So we've had a dry fall and winter, and even though we might be getting some water this spring, our trees are still showing signs of drought stress.

That can look like trees that are slow to leaf out.

Trees with leaves that are smaller than usual, or even show some tip die back.

So there are still some things that you can do to help your trees bite this drought stress.

That will include supplemental watering and mulching.

But before we get the hose out, it's important to think about and determine how much water our trees really need.

Because overwatering is just as problematic as underwatering.

So to check the soil moisture, we'll use a long screwdriver or a soil probe, and what we want to do is stick that soil probe into the ground, 6 to 9 inches, because that's where most of the absorbing roots are.

If we pull that out, kind of like sticking a toothpick and a cake batter, and the soil is moist, then it's probably okay and we don't need to water.

But if we stick that soil probe in there, and we either can get the soil probe down 69 inches, or it's dry and dusty, then we probably need to add some supplemental watering.

So, will water new and young trees a little bit differently than our mature trees?

When we're watering our young trees, what we want to do is think about establishing deeper roots.

And that will look like potentially using a 5 gallon bucket with a quarter inch hole in the bottom.

You can estimate how much water a tree needs by using 10 gallons of water for each inch of trunk diameter.

That means a two inch diameter tree would need about 20 gallons of water.

So if you're using your five gallon bucket, That's four or five gallon buckets.

As we think about watering our mature trees, even though they have larger roots, they still need help when it's this dry outside.

So what we want to do is, instead of using the five gallon bucket, we'll use a soaker hose.

And we can spiral that in a pattern, kind of nearer the tree's canopy.

Then what you do is turn on your water, and kind of let it run for an hour, and then come back and recheck using your soil probe.

You may need to keep going in water just until you get until that top 6 to 9 inches of soil is moist.

Another thing, you can't just rely on water alone.

Mulching is something that we can do that's pretty easy, and that can really help our landscapes.

So adding two to four inches of an organic woodchip mulch is a great way to support your trees during periods of drought.

A common mistake that we often see is that folks rely on their lawn irrigation systems to provide water and think that's enough for their trees.

But watering deeply for turf is only 4 to 6 inches, wherein that's not enough for our tree roots, as we've talked about.

Prioritizing watering your woody trees is a great way to keep your landscape healthy and sustainable, even during these periods of drought and challenging growing conditions.

For more information, check out your local extension office, and they'd be happy to help you out.

Remember, your trees have vastly different water needs than your turf.

Just because your grass is green doesn't mean your trees have had enough water.

So take a look at your trees this weekend and followed these tips to make sure they're getting the water they need.

[Brad Mills, Host]

For Nebraska Extension Almanac, I'm Brad Mills. Nebraska Extension Almanac is a production of IANR media and Nebraska Extension. For more information on how your university is serving Nebraskans, go to extension.unl.edu. 

[Brad Mills, Host]

Nebraska Extension Almanac. Our past years and ranges are becoming increasingly threatened with the spread of eastern red cedar trees.Nebraska extension educator Bethany Johnston says, this encroachment goes beyond just a change in scenery.

[Bethany Johnson, Nebraska Extension Educator]

Cedar trees are out competing grasses, reduce forage options for grazing, and can increase the risk of wildfires.

The most important predictor of where cedar trees are going to start encroaching.

It's not necessarily your soil type or the fact that you did a good job with your grazing management or your range management, but it's how close your unmarred prairie is to a Eastern red cedar seed source.

We planted these wind breaks and the cedar trees.

There's male and female trees.

But once they're mature, kind of those big ones you like to have in your shelter belts, those female trees can put out one. 150000000 berries every year.

So if you start running the numbers.

So if you just assume every other tree is a female, you can measure, like I've done it on Google Maps.

I'll measure my shelter belts, I'll count how many rows, and then figure out how far apart they've been planted, and I can get a tree count, and then if I divide that number by 2, that gives me how many females, and then I can take that times 1000000 or one. 1500000 and figure out how many seeds are coming out of that shelter belt every year.

And we have just kind of a 3 row cedar belt that goes around our calving pasture and it's not a very big area.

It's maybe, I think, 2030 acres.

But there was one hillside out in the pasture.

I always have to cut and I would get 20 or 30 little cedar trees off there and I can remember thinking, gosh, I can't believe I'm cutting all these trees.

And then I figured how many berries were coming out of that shelter belt and it's like half a 1000000000 berries every year or seeds every year.

And so when I cut that hill now, I'm thinking, well, at least I'm not cutting like half a 1000000000, right?

But the thing is, is we just, once they've kind of hopped the fence, right?

So we fence out our shelter belts.

Once you see a cedar tree, that you haven't planted outside in your grassland, that's when you need to start doing management on it.

And the nice thing about cedar seeds or cedar berries, the professionals call them cones because they're actually a conifer, but they're not going to, you know, float through the wind, anything like that.

So birds are actually the ones that spread them.

So most of your encroachment is going to happen within that 200 yards of that seed source because the birds are going to eat the seeds and then they're going to fly away and poop out the seeds.

And so usually you can kind of draw a 200 yard circle around and then that's where maybe you start hand pruning them.

Other people, they have such big shelter belts and they just can't physically keep up by using pruners or mechanical means.

And so they're actually just doing like little tiny prescribed burns next to their shelter belts because then it cleans out those little cedars and it's just a little bit easier to to manage.

And probably, you know, 20 years ago.

We used to tell people, well, if you cut a cedar tree once, you don't have to go back and do maintenance.

And that's partially true because if you cut a cedar tree below their bottom branch, they're not going to resprout.

So if you think of things like sumac or wild plump, like we can cut those, and it almost makes them more aggressive and they send out rhizomes and they come back, right?

But cedar trees, you can cut them off at the base and they're not going to resprout.

But the problem is that seed source.

So unless you're willing to take out that entire seed source.

And if you do that, then you're going to have to put up some kind of, you know, metal wind break or something to break the wind for you.

But unless you remove the seeds, it's going to be maintenance, right?

We're going to do cedar control every year, whether that's cutting or using chemicals or using fire or maybe a combination of all of those.

[Brad Mills, Host]

Today's program was a portion of an interview taken from a recent beef watch podcast offered by Nebraska extension. To hear the entire interview, go to beef.unl.edu or download from Apple Podcasts. For Nebraska extension almanac, I'm Brad Mills. Nebraska Extension Almanac is a production of IANR Media and Nebraska Extension. For more information on how your university is serving Nebraskans, go to extension.unl.edu.