We've been monitoring the 24 Mile Road construction project and more closely we've been watching over our beautiful Shelby Township trees on that road.
Shelby hired an arborist to keep the safety of these beautiful trees that make a canopy over the road through town from Mound to Shelby Roads. Kay Sicheneder from Owen Tree Service has been working with road workers keeping the safety of our trees top priority. With construction almost done Kay gives us an update on how the trees are doing.
In there that folks might be seeing and with it might be concerned about. What you might see on any one of the given trees is broken branches up top. It'll just look like a browned out leaves on a small portion and that’s basically were the machinery had hit it and snapped that twig. Now, all that trimming will be done when they are finished with the project and he believes around between November December, something like that. So we'll get out there and get all that cleaned up and so next spring you shouldn’t see a lot of broken anything. And honestly everything's looking pretty good.
Now, there are some trees that are not looking great and it's not due to construction so I thought I'd bring that to your attention and one of them is the oaks and white oaks in particular. If you just go east of Shelby on the south side of the road there is a lot of, they look very yellow. That's called chlorosis and what that indicates is the trees aren’t obtaining the nutrients they need and that's usually because our soil isn't what they love. So, it is a serious problem and it's something an arborist can help with it. It has nothing to do with construction so if they are looking yellow and some of them are dying back pretty hard.
And the other problem I'm seeing out there which is killing trees unfortunately is the Scotch pine are getting root collar weevil. I investigated it when I first saw it. I knew it wasn't related to the construction but I wanted to let the Shelby folks know and specifically the county that would be responsible for taking the trees down. So, there's a couple of dead pines again on Shelby Road on the North side and then more dying, unfortunately. But that's a tough, tough serious pest that they do get. So, an arborist could help you with that if you have one of them and your like, you know, mine is kind of looking funny, you might want to give an arborist a call and get that taken care of.
But otherwise, things are moving along and I think we maintained a pretty nice canopy. I think folks will notice. Hopefully, all they really notice is, oh the streets’ still shaded and all that. Now, yup, the canopy is up higher but it's still nice and full and I’m thrilled with that.
Pinewood nematode is a disease contracted by beetles who carry the disease from tree to tree. This is much like the Dutch elm disease. You can't save a tree that has it, you can only prevent it.
● Leonard
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