Spikeless Tree Pruning
We love trees. Proper pruning and trimming makes them safer, healthier, grow stronger and be more beautiful. We never use spikes when pruning trees, thus no wounds in the bark and live tissues that make them susceptible to beetle infestation, damage, disease or death.
Pruning and trimming your trees helps keep them healthy, long-lasting, and looking their best. And sure, you can try this yourself, but over-trimming a tree or pruning at the wrong time of year can cause permanent harm to the tree, so it’s best to let experienced arborists do the pruning right. Our certified arborists at Jeremiah’s Tree Service can handle the regular maintenance and tree care that your most beloved trees need to promote strong growth and improved tree health.
Many of our local competitor tree services companies encourage their team to wear spikes to climb the trees they service because it offers a sturdy and safe way to quickly climb a tree. Most often it helps them make more money quickly without regard to our gorgeous Lake Tahoe forests.
Using spikes or spurs to climb a living tree is damaging. The health of your trees is important to us. As licensed arborists, our commitment is to ensure their health and inflict minimal injury to a living tree, which is why we always perform our pruning, cutting or other services using spikeless tree climbing.
Spike Damage can cause the following blights to your trees:
- Bacterial Infections
- Fungal Infections
- Disease Transfer
- Insect Infestation – Lake Tahoe Bark Beetles
- Tree Death
- Compromised Immune System
An experienced tree care professional with the right training and equipment can safely ascend and descend a tree without the need of damaging spikes. It may take a bit longer, but it’s worth it to us. It is also against TRPA regulations and National Treework Standards to spike trees for pruning.
As with any living organism on earth, each wound requires healing. The healing process takes energy and makes the tree more susceptible to other threats. Even a tree in optimal health could be taken down because of issues occurring due to the spike holes left from spurring. In the Lake Tahoe area, our trees are already facing beetle infestation, drought, fires and dry air, so we want to do everything we can to preserve our natural arboreal beauty.
Regardless of who you choose to care for your trees, be sure to always ask if they use spikes on live trees! There are other tree climbing options including rope climbing, using a bucket truck or special equipment.
We do use spikes for safety and efficiency when working on dead trees and full tree removals, because there is no way to further damage a tree that is already dead.
We proudly climb trees and prune without spikes in the Tahoe City, Truckee, Incline Village, Kings Beach, North Lake Tahoe areas with high-quality, safe tree work. We are licensed, bonded, qualified and experienced. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or job requests, by calling us at (530) 581-1945.