Planting Several Sugar Maple Trees? Tips to Help Them Grow Healthy And Strong
Sugar maples are beautiful trees that will provide you and your family shade once it grows tall. During the spring months, this tree provides green, small flowers. When fall arrives the leaves turn into beautiful colors. To ensure your new sugar maples grow healthy and strong, below is information on planting and taking care of them.
Choosing the Site
It is important that you choose the right site for your sugar maples. These trees grow best where they can get partial sun, which is around four hours per day. These trees also need to be planted in deep soil that drains well. Sugar maples grow very tall and if planted too close together will not grow to their full height.
Have the soil tested, which you can do yourself or send to an extension office. The soil should be slightly alkaline or acidic. If not, you can add the proper nutrients to the soil. A tree service company can help you with this or a landscape contractor.
Taking Care of Your Sugar Maples
Sugar maples are drought-tolerant trees but if you go several days without rain you need to water them. You can put a few inches of mulch around the base of the tree to help retain moisture. If you do this push the mulch away a few inches from the tree so you do not smother it.
Once the tree gets tall, you'll want to ensure you have it pruned by a tree service company. This will remove weak and dead branches, which will help the tree replace these with stronger branches. This will also help keep the blooms on the tree during the spring months. The tree service can tell you when the best time to prune the trees is, and how often they should be pruned.
Fertilize your newly planted sugar maples to give them a good start in growing. A tree service company can tell you the type of fertilizer you should use and how to use it on your trees.
Knowing Diseases That Can Affect These Trees
You need to know diseases that can affect sugar maples so you can get the problem taken care of quicker. There are a few diseases that these commonly get. One is a fungal disease called anthracnose. The leaves will turn brown and drop during the summer months. You will see canker sores on the branches. The best treatment is to hire a tree service company to prune the tree to remove the affected branches.
Tar spot is another fungus these trees can get. Dark spots will appear on the leaves. This fungus will not kill your maples, however. When leaves fall during the fall make sure you clean them up.
A tree car service company can give you much more information about these trees.
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