KDSN RADIO News
How to and how not to care for your trees during an Iowa winter
Tomorrow is the first day of winter, and if our landscaping should happen to get heaped with snow in the weeks and months ahead, there are good ways and bad ways to handle it, especially if you did any fall planting.
Aaron Steil, a consumer horticulture specialist at the Iowa State University Extension, says homeowners may be concerned about their trees and other plants being damaged by a heavy, wet snow, especially if their limbs are sagging.
“Most of the time, plants do a pretty good job of shedding that snow off all on their own,” Steil says, “but if you do have a younger plant or an evergreen that seems to be very weighed down by snow, you can go out and brush it off using your hand or a broom.”
If you want to clear that snow off yourself, he says there is a right way — and a wrong way — to go about the process.
“Just make sure you do it in an upward motion instead of a downward one,” he says, “so that you don’t stress branches that are bending down even more.”
Steil says ice can do infinitely more damage to young plants than snow, however, he says you need to resist the urge to try to remove ice from their frozen boughs and limbs.
“You’re likely to do more damage than good. If you try to go out and remove ice from shrubs and trees in your landscape, you can go out and maybe prop something up with a board, if you’re really worried about it,” Steil says. “Otherwise, trying to break it off or throwing hot water on it to try to melt it off, all of those always do more damage than help.”
The best thing you can do for an ice-coated tree, he says, is to leave it alone and let the sun warm it up.
