Over 60% of homes are viewed online before the potential buyer contacts an agent which means before the buyer can drive down your street and see your amazing neighborhood they’ve already decided whether your house is worthy of visiting. What’s completely overlooked by sellers is that people have to fall in love with the exterior. Most have already made plans to update the interior to their liking but do not want to be bothered with an unkempt exterior.
 
Proper landscaping will exaggerate the key features of a house and draw your eye to a focal point. When prospective buyers arrive at a home, they are 65 % sure that the home will be or will not be a good investment before stepping inside the house. The overall objective to your tree care is to raise the esthetic value while adding a tangible real value with the types of trees you add.
 
According to a study conducted by South Carolina’s Clemson University, the financial return on good tree care is 100% or more. No other home improvement comes close; not even a remodeled kitchen or an additional bathroom. If you buy an immature tree for $100 and that tree grows to a height of 40 feet, it will add somewhere between $1,000 to $10,000 to the value of your house. So says the Council of Tree and Landscape Appraisers. Mature trees generate an ROI between 10 – 100 times. 

What else do you own that you get to enjoy for 5-10 years and then sell it for MORE than you pay for it? We don’t know of anything else. Not a car. Not furniture. Nothing… except trees.
 
When you’re ready to sell your home, you can expect to sell the house faster and for more money when you have great curb appeal. Houses with great landscape curb appeal reduces the time it takes to sell a house  by 10-15% and increases the selling price by 7-19%, according to a joint project by the National Gardening Association  and the University of Washington. The International City/County Management Association claims a home with healthy, mature trees can get 20% more than a home without. Landscape economist John Harris says the differential can be as high as 28%.
 
The thing about trees is that the more mature they are when you buy them, the more expensive they are. To get the greatest return you’ll need to plant immature trees 5-7 years before you sell your home. According to the US Census Bureau, the median duration of home ownership is 5.9 years. That means you’ll want to plant and care for new trees when you buy your home in order to get the most financial return out of it when you sell your house. ​

We never recommend that a person cut down a tree themselves. There are too many inherent dangers in a falling tree. But if you absolutely want to cut down a tree on your own, we want you to be informed about how to do it. 

This video, produced by power tool manufacturer Husqvarna, takes you through the steps of cutting down a tree. It is not an entertainment video, it's a training video. It is 45 minutes long. I know that's long in today's society. But, trust me, if you've never cut down a tree, you want to watch every minute of this video. 45 minutes is nothing if it saves your lie. By comparison, we invested a lot more than 45 minutes in our education to fell a tree. (And aren't you glad we did :) )   

If, after watching this video, you decide it's a bigger job than you want to tackle, give us a call at 952-679-7373 and we'll do it for you. 

It’s difficult to remove a tree. I don’t mean the act of cutting down a tree is difficult (though it can be.)  I mean the emotional difficulty we face when it’s time to cut down a tree in our yard. It’s especially hard if it’s a mature tree and you’re the one who planted it when it was a sapling. You’ve likely enjoyed the tree for years. It’s provided shade on those sweltering Minnesota summer days. Maybe you’ve hung bird feeders from it over the years. Or perhaps you take a picture of your children next to the tree each year and talk about how the children and the tree have all grown.

But if it’s time to remove a tree, not cutting it down comes with worse problems. A healthy, strong tree is an asset to your home. A dying tree is a liability.

​














Here are some visual clues to help you know when it’s time to call in a professional to confirm or deny if it’s time to remove a tree.

• Look at the base of the tree. Do you see fungi (might look like mushrooms), growing?
• Are there cracks in the bark or is the bark coming off the root collar?
• Are the tree leaves brown? If they are, and they remain attached to the tree, that’s a sign the limb is dead. Yes, leaves turn brown in autumn, but they should also fall from the tree.
• Are the limbs brittle? Do they snap off in your hand when you attempt to bend a limb?
• Look at the crown of the tree. There should be twigs with living buds.  If not, that could be a sign the tree is dying or dead. Also, are there dead branches hanging?
  
  

Finally, try the scratch test – scrape the bark with your nail just hard enough to remove the top layer of bark. If it’s green underneath the bark, the limb is alive. If it’s brown, that branch is dead. Check several branches and the trunk with the scratch test.

If your tree has any of the signs above, call us to come out and assess the health of tree. If it’s time to remove the tree, we’ll provide you with an estimate. If we believe the tree can be saved, we’ll share our recommendations for nurturing it back to health. Either way, it will result in a safer yard for you and your family. 

​It's amazing to me how something as small as a fungus can take down something as majestic as an Oak tree. But it sure can.  In a short 4-6 weeks, a once beautiful Red Oak will be killed by Ceratocystis fagacearum. ​ Oak trees within the Red Oak family are more susceptible to the disease than White Oaks, but White Oaks aren't immune. 

AND the disease can easily spread between trees, so at the first sign of Oak Wilt, you want to call in a tree care expert to determine if you need to cut down the tree or if it can be saved. It's bad enough to lose one tree, but even worse to lose all of them!  If the tree cannot be saved, the roots will need to be severed between the diseased tree and other trees. Cutting down the tree before "vibratory plowing" is known to cause the disease to spread more quickly. 

Oak Wilt disease is spread both above ground and under ground.

Above ground the disease spreads when when a nitidulid beetle feeds on the fungal mat of an infected oak and then lands on a fresh wound of a healthy oak. This is one of the reasons it's important to prune oak trees in the winter. The beetles aren't active in winter so the wounds caused by pruning heal before the beetles are mobile. The beetles are most known for transporting Oak Wilt between April and July, so definitely stay away from that time frame with regards to pruning oak trees. 

Below ground oak tree roots graft together. It isn't uncommon for different species of oak trees to graft together either. When the roots of an infected Oak graft with the roots of a healthy Oak, the oak wilt disease travels through the grafted roots from the sickly tree to the healthy one. This can happen between trees as far apart as 50-80 feet. 

Where did Oak Wilt start?

No one really knows where the disease started. However, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 

Since 1944, the disease has spread south and east, affecting Oak trees in 23 known states. 

Well, that was the craziest Christmas weather I’ve seen in a long time. Rain on Christmas day in Bloomington, Minnesota. No one would have believed it! And I don’t know what it was like at your house, but I went out to get the Star Tribune at the end of my driveway and slipped and fell on my backside. Then, to get back up the house I had to walk in the snow because the shoes I slipped on to grab the paper were no match for the layer of ice on the driveway!

THAT’S how I’ll remember Christmas 2016 in Minneapolis.

And now, with presents unwrapped, my wife and I back to work and the kids whining they’re bored, it’s time to take down the Christmas tree. We usually do it the first weekend in January, but with the temps in the 30s now and forecasted to fall, we’re opting to take it down today. That got me to thinking about when people do take the down their Christmas tree.

What I discovered are there are three dates that Americans most commonly take down their Christmas tree. 

Before New Year’s Day: I guess that’s not technically a “date.” The way the articles read, I got the impression they meant there’s a large contingency of people who take down their tree on New Year’s Eve.  Apparently these people believe if the tree isn’t down before the stroke of midnight , all the bad luck they had in 2016 will follow them into 2017. That made me wonder what the history behind this superstition is, but try as I might, I couldn’t find any background on this. So I’m chalking this one up to “old wives tale.”

12th Day of Christmas:  The 12 Days of Christmas officially begin on Christmas day, so that puts the 12th day of Christmas on January 5.

Epiphany:  The tradition of taking down the Christmas Tree on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ is steeped in Christianity. The Epiphany, which is January 6, is the day that Jesus was baptized and His baptism marks the end of the Christmas season.  

For those who don’t have a symbolic date to take down their Christmas tree, the first weekend in January is often when the tree comes down because that’s when most people have time in their schedule to do so.

Once the tree is down, what do you do with it?

If it's artificial, you take it apart, fold it up and store it until next year. If it's a real tree, you can have it picked up by your trash hauler. 

According to the City of Bloomington website, Christmas tree curbside pick up is available for Bloomington residents, but the site instructs you to “contact your hauler for their specific requirements.”

Since we had to do that for ourselves, we figured we'd call all of Bloomington's trash haulers to save you the time of sitting on hold with your trash service provider. Every trash disposal company said they will be picking up Christmas trees during the first two weeks of January on your regular pick up date EXCEPT Garbage Man of Bloomington who said you must call them to schedule a pick up time during the first two weeks of January.

Most providers also have a tree height restriction. If your tree is taller than their tree height restriction, you must cut the tree so that the largest part of the tree is not taller than the maximum height. 

Here’s what each licensed garbage hauler told us with regards to variable details: