Tree Trimming & Pruning in Valley Stream

If there's a seventy-year-old maple over your roof, this is the work that keeps it from turning into a claim: deadwood out, weight off the limbs hanging over the house, clearance from the siding and the wires, all of it done before the wind does it for you.

What pruning fixes

• Deadwood. Dead limbs come down on their own schedule, usually in wind, usually onto something. Getting them out is the highest-value cut you can make on a mature tree.
• Weight over the roof. A long horizontal limb over the house carries a lot of leverage. Cutting it back to a strong lateral takes the load off before a nor'easter tests it. If that's the limb over the bedroom that's kept you up in every windstorm, this is the cut that fixes it.
• Clearance. Limbs rubbing the roof, the gutters, or the siding. Canopy grown into the service drop. PSEG trims around the primary lines on a four-year cycle, but they don't touch the drop to your house, and a branch sawing on that line is how you lose power on a clear night.
• Structure on younger trees. Fixing a bad crotch or a second leader on a twenty-year-old tree is a small cut now or a split trunk later. Bradford pears are the textbook case.
• Light and air. Thinning a dense canopy lets wind pass through instead of catching it like a sail. That's the difference between a tree that bends in a storm and one that goes over.

The trees we're usually up in

Norway maple, silver maple, London plane, pin oak, red oak, the odd big spruce, and the Bradford and Callery pears that went in everywhere in the 80s. Most of it was planted in the two decades after the war, and it's now at exactly the age where a good prune every few years is the difference between keeping the tree and taking it down. The Sandy salt hit the London planes hard along the south side. A lot of what looks like deadwood in those trees is exactly that, a decade later.

How we cut, and what we won't do

Proper cuts at the branch collar so the tree can close the wound. No flush cuts, no stubs, no climbing spikes on a tree that's staying (spikes are for removals). No topping, ever. It's illegal inside the Village without a permit, and the flush of weak growth it causes is more dangerous in a storm than the tree you had. And nobody on our crew works within ten feet of the primary lines. That's PSEG's territory by law, and when a tree is in it, we coordinate with them.

Before storm season, not after

Hurricane season peaks August into October, and nor'easters run all winter. The pruning that prevents a claim happens in the months before, when we can schedule it at a normal price, not the week after Isaias when every truck in Nassau is spoken for. If you've got a big tree over the house and you're not sure about it, a look costs nothing. Most of the time it ends with "prune these three limbs," not "take it down." And the first windy night after the deadwood's out, you'll notice how quiet the house is.

Past the point where pruning helps? See tree removal. Otherwise call (516) 619-3667 and we'll come look at what's hanging over the house.