Does a tree service work the farm and country places around Paragould?
Yes. A farmhouse out toward Marmaduke or Lafe gets the same tree service in Paragould that a yard on the ridge gets: removals, trimming, stump grinding and cleanup, priced on a walk of the trees. What changes on a country place is the setting. There is more open ground and a longer drive in, and more of the trees stand over buildings that are not the house.
Most of Greene County is row-crop ground on either side of the ridge, and the houses out there tend to keep their trees close. The yard is what got planted. Past it the fields run flat to the next tree line, so the pecan by the porch and the row along the drive take wind that a town tree gets from behind a neighbor’s roof.
A crew sizing up a farmhouse reads those trees as a set, since on a lot of these places they went in within a few years of each other.
What happens to a big yard pecan as it gets old?
It gets heavy at the ends. An old pecan grown in the open throws long, nearly level limbs out over the drive and often the roof, and the weight keeps adding at the tips. Deadwood collects up high where nobody looks. Most old pecans can be kept with pruning. Removal is for the one that has split at a main fork or died back through the top.
The University of Florida’s extension fact sheet on pecan describes a habit called summer limb drop, “branch failure in the middle of a large-diameter branch,” and says it “typically occurs on a very hot summer day with no wind.” The same sheet’s answer is “preventive pruning to eliminate some of the weight along major horizontal limbs,” and it says that thinning should be done by a professional.
On a farmhouse the question is what those long limbs reach. A pecan limb over grass can come down and cost an afternoon of cleanup. The same limb over the porch roof or the chairs where people sit in the evening is the one to deal with first, and thinning the weight off an old shade tree’s long limbs is how most of these pecans are kept.
You can see a lot from the porch steps. Look for a limb that stayed bare after the rest of the tree leafed out, and for limbs that dip lower at the tip every year.
Why does an old tree row along the drive or the field side fail all at once?
The trees went in together. A row planted the same year, usually one kind of tree, grows at the same pace and ages at the same pace, so when the first one starts to fail the rest are rarely far behind. Each one also stands out in the open, with the field on one side and nothing to break the wind for it.
What the row is made of varies from one place to the next. Cedar, pecan and water oak all turn up in old plantings, and the University of Arkansas extension lists water oak as native to Arkansas.
From the drive, these are the signs that a row has turned the corner:
- A dead top on one tree, or a few, standing gray above the green
- A gap where one already went over
- A tree leaning toward the drive or the county road it once stood straight beside
- Bark sloughing off one side of a trunk
- Sprouts and suckers coming up thick around the base
One of those on one tree is a single removal. Several of them along the row usually means a plan for the whole line, taken a few trees at a time, with the gaps replanted.
A row tree that goes over across the drive or the road out front can close the only way in, so the row is worth reading in summer, when dead tops stand out against full leaf.
What changes when the tree stands over the shop, the grain bins or the propane tank?
The way it comes down. A tree with open ground around it can often be dropped in one piece. A tree over a metal-roof shop, a set of bins or a propane tank cannot, so it is taken apart from the top and each piece is lowered on a rope. That takes more time and more gear, and it is decided on the walk.
These trees mostly planted themselves. A hackberry or an oak comes up in the corner by the shop where the mower never reached, and by now it is taller than the building. A falling limb can dent sheet metal and open a roof seam. Nobody wants one landing near a propane tank either.
There is usually a wire involved too. The overhead line out to the barn or the shop runs right through the trees that grew up beside it. That line belongs to whichever utility serves the road, and the guide on a limb near the service line covers who gets called before any cutting.
When the tree has to go, taking a big tree down beside a building is planned around where each piece lands. The estimator will want to know what is inside the shop and whether the bins are full, because that changes how much room there is to work.
Is a tree out in open ground cheaper to take down than one in town?
Often, yes. A tree that can be felled whole into the yard or the field edge skips the rigging, and rigging is where most of the time goes on a big removal. The same size tree crowded between a house and a garage in town gets taken down in pieces. Out in the open the felling is quick, and the cleanup after it is most of the job.
A few things decide the rest. The drive out is real time on a crew’s day. A soft yard on the flats in a wet winter can keep heavy equipment off the grass until it dries. Then there is the wood. Haul-off sits inside the written price, and if the house heats with wood the trunk can be bucked to length and left stacked, which brings the estimate down.
Each of those shows up itemized on the written estimate, and the ranges for tree removal prices on this site give you a number to hold it against.
Should the big shade tree and the wind row by the house stay?
The big tree on the west or south side of the house earns its keep every July, and a row that breaks the wind off an open field is hard to replace. Either one is worth keeping when the trunk and the main limbs are sound.
Sound means no deep crack where the big limbs meet and no hollow or mushrooms at the base. A tree with those faults can sometimes be pruned back into a safer shape and kept for years, and sometimes it cannot. The difference usually shows from the ground once somebody walks all the way around the trunk.