Should I Trim? | The Best Time for Your Oak and Elm Trees

Oak and elm trees are very sustainable trees with long lives and steady growth. Sounds nice, right? Yes! It is nice. Still, these trees can pose a few issues. 

For one, these oak and elm trees are often affected with diseases. It's helpful to know that this season is the time that they're increasingly likely to become infected. 

As the sap on the tree becomes wet with the rain and cold, beetles are attracted, and these little guys carry fungus picked up from other places. Then, they deposit the spores into any open spots on the tree. How nasty and inconvenient is that? It's very similar to the way that human skin becomes infected when bacteria enters a wound. 

Next, the active sap stream takes the disease and spreads it throughout the oak and elm trees. (If the sap were a human, I'd be quite dissatisfied with its choices.) The devastated tree then begins to die. Albeit a slow death, a mature oak or elm tree can be dead within two years! 

As we mentioned the wet and rainy seasons making these trees susceptible to these types of infections, we should note that the best time to trim them is during their dormant season. For most oak and elm trees, this is between October and February. Because the sap is not running through the tree, - and therefore limbs and branches - the beetle is inactive and not interested in the places where it could carry disease.

Call a professional and only prune when the tree is dormant to eliminate the spread of this vicious fungus before we lose all of our beloved old oak trees and our beautiful elms in Kansas City.