These trees better watch their backs
There are two trees — one on my front lawn and one in my backyard — that insist on dropping spiked gumballs all over the place. The spiked balls start out green in the summer and after dropping turn brown and hard. Many of them stay in the trees through the fall and turn brown there, and then, in the winter when it snows or rains hard, they start to fall. In the spring as new leaves grow in, some of the spiked balls fall and the trees wait until the older spiked balls have been cleaned up before letting others fall. The trees are mean like that.
You can turn an ankle if you step on the balls. They’re small enough to be constantly underfoot and hard to avoid. They can’t be mowed up — the blades of the mower just shoot the spiked balls in every direction and nearly take out your eye, or impale your leg if you’re wearing shorts. The only way to get them off of the grass — so you can mow and play in the yard without stepping on the balls — is to rake them into piles and shovel them into lawn bags or trash cans for the sanitation workers to take away once a week.
Oh, and there are thousands of these spiked balls. And more thousands after that. And then some more. I can fill 2 large trash cans to the top, which is hours of work, and a week later the spiked balls are all over the grass again and it looks like I didn’t do a thing, because there are thousands and thousands of these things still in each tree, which, diabolical trees that they are, choose to have the balls fall steadily throughout the spring and summer and fall, for the express purpose of making me clean them up. They’re there waiting silently in the tree. Mocking me. Silently.
Why would anyone invent such a tree and what kind of sadist would put not one but two of them on my property? It’s a sick, sick world.
We just moved into this house last summer, and there is no way I am going to spend the next 30 years raking up these spiked balls week after week for months on end. Can you hear that noise, trees? It’s called a chainsaw. Yeah, I know you’re big and tall and made of wood and armed with thousands of spiked balls, but I will not be mocked by a tree. You better watch your back.
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“-the blades of the mower just shoot the spiked balls in every direction and nearly take out your eye or impale your leg if you’re wearing shorts.”
Scott – ah – I think you may be wearing your shorts wrong?
Scott, you and your chainsaw may be able to handle those trees … but watch our for the Lorax!
Andrew, I’ll add the comma so no one will think I wear shorts over my eyes to protect against spiked balls. Though one would have to try really hard to think that is what that sentence means.
Jeff, when the Lorax comes to my house and offers to pick up the spiked balls each week, and helps pay my mortgage, he can speak for my trees. Until then, he should stay away from the chain saw.
Those sweet gums are dropping so many seed pods because they’re a species tailor-made to live in wet areas, like creek bottoms, where the gum balls get washed away frequently. It’s a survival strategy, and many other pinoeer species are similarly adapted to producing large seed crops.
Furthermore, the way you describe them, these gums are old. As a tree nears the end of its life cycle, the seed crops it’s producing go up in size in an effort to blanket the immediate vicinity with seed that can take off as soon as the parent’s crown cover is removed.
If you don’t get rid of them on your own, nature will do so in a decade or so. Might as well be proactive.
Your two options:
1) Hire someone to come in and cut them down, then haul off the brush,
OR
2) Go to Wal-Mart and get some Eliminator ( or any other concentrate mix of isopropylamine salt, doesn’t have to be name brand ).
Ignore the directions on the sucker, you’re going to want to keep the mixture at about 33% – 40% for this.
Take a hatchet and make 3 cuts for each 6 inches in diameter of the tree (so, if the tree has a diameter of 24 inches at 4.5 ft off the ground, you’re going to make 9 or 10 hacks). These cuts don’t need to be deep, all you’re looking to do is to break the surface of the bark and get to the phloem underneath the vascular cambium. This is the plant tissue which carries the sugars produced in the leaves down to the non-photosynthetic parts of the plant (like the roots).
Screw a squirt nozzle onto the top of the Eliminator. Any squirt nozzle will do, steal one off an empty bottle of Windex or something.
Now, in each one of those hacks, squirt a full trigger pull’s worth of isopropylamine salt concentrate into the hack. The phloem will transport the chemical down to the roots, disrupting the root’s hydrogen ion pump and removing its ability to feed itself.
This can be done at any time of the year EXCEPT during the spring when the leaves are coming out and all of the plant’s sap is flowing up. You want to do this after full leaf out, or during the winter, when sap is flowing down the tree.
Gums are very, very, very sensitive to this treatment. Just showing the bottle of chemical to them is almost enough to kill them, but if you give each tree an injected dose of concentrate in each of the hacks, you’ll never have to owrry about gum balls again.
Mike, Would the tree be healthy after this procedure, still grow leaves and look okay? Just the balls would stop coming but everything else would be the same? And those hacks in the side of the tree, will they heal, or would I have a tree with a bunch of gashes forever? My whole neighborhood has these trees. Maybe the builders got them for a cheap price when the houses were built around 30 years ago. Maybe they were here already. I don’t know.
@ Scott
It’d kill the tree.
The gum trees begin producing seed at about 30 years of age, and they continue producing seed until they are ready to die. They can live up to 150 years in their native range (the south east), but probably won’t live so long in NY where you’re at. If they’re taller than 50 or 60 foot, they were probably there before the neighborhood homes were built.
They are often planted as ornamentals because of the vivid color of their leaves during the fall, the reds and yellows they produce rival those of the maples, but the downside of having them up next to your home (other than the “ankle twisters” – another name for their seed pods) is that their wood is very brittle, and limbs snap off easily in high winds or when covered with snow.
They also have a medium to low tolerance for soil salt levels, meaning that they won’t live so long next to a street which gets salted during the winter. This is also the reason that hack n’ squirt works so well on them, as you’re pushing a form of salt into their roots to disrupt their ion pump.
Hack n’ squirt will kill the trees without forcing you to worry about dropping the trees around powerlines, homes, etc. If you’re not an experienced feller, I wouldn’t recommend firing up the Husky or the Stihl in a residential neighborhood. The chemical kill is easier and cheaper than making an insurance claim when you hit someone else’s house with a falling tree, or bringing in a crew to remove them for you.
If you do decide to have a tree service remove them for you, I would recommend finding a certified arborist who has a good reputation at tree climbing. Contact your city’s urban forester or your local DEC officer to get the name of a good crew.
(Contact info for the citizens of NY: http://www.dec.ny.gov/about/27790.html )
Thanks for the information. I’m in Pennsylvania, in the suburbs — our suburbs are more rural than New York’s generally, so the trees live pretty long I guess. Trees everywhere, plenty of tree companies, have used some before. Getting the trees taken out and the stumps too not a problem as long as it’s in the budget. I wouldn’t take that project on myself — these trees are way too big for me. I played with a chainsaw a few weeks ago to cut some low branches, but these are decent-size trees and out of my league. Killing them chemically isn’t going to do it. I don’t want a dead tree in my yard. It isn’t a huge property with the trees hiding off in the woods. A dying tree would not look good. So I’ll keep them until I’m ready to pay someone to get them out. Thanks for the advice.
@ Scott
I wrote that after getting a big shot at the doctor’s. I knew that you lived in Pennslyvania… Complete brain fart.
My bad.
If those trees are that big, they’re probably older than the housing around you. I’d say that they’re going to have to come out within the 30 year time frame you specified in the piece.
If you don’t have “tree removal” in the budget, killing the trees with a $10 of chemical from Wal-Mart will get rid of the gumballs until you do have the money saved up.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Form follows function. Your function is getting rid of the gum balls for safety purposes.
Best of luck!
* $10 bottle of chemical…
Ugh.
I should go to bed.