Contributed photos
Chris Ozyck (right, in green hat) with a street tree pruning team.
Urban Resources Initiative sent in this article.
Winter may be coming, but that doesn’t mean that those who care for New Haven’s urban forest are turning in for the season.
Urban Resources Initiative, a nonprofit/university partnership at the local Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, is gearing up to send out winter crews to prune over 500 young street trees in the next few months.
Earlier this month, Chris Ozyck and Caroline (Caro) Scanlan of Urban Resources Initiative trained a small team of Yale students to carry out the essential pieces of a young tree structural pruning program – a critical component of the tree planting and tree care program that URI has been running in partnership with the City of New Haven for over a decade.
The group gathered on Farnham Avenue, where Suzanne Huminski – the Sustainability Coordinator at Southern Connecticut State University – has requested over 30 street trees from URI over the past five years.
Early efforts to reduce structural issues by pruning young trees now means minimizing future risks in mature trees (branch failure during storms, clearance issues along roadways and sidewalks) and maximizing the benefits that trees provide everyone in our city – improved air quality, flood control, climate change mitigation, increased shade and beauty…among so many more!
Starting With Residents
URI’s pruning season is merely one piece of a holistic tree planting and tree care program that starts with local tree adopters.
Since the start of 2010, URI’s GreenSkills tree planting and green jobs program has planted over 5,600 trees in New Haven’s public domain.
Each tree is planted according to a request-based system, where any New Haven resident or business owner can request a free tree to be planted in front of their property, so long as there is room to plant and they are able to commit to watering the tree for the first three years as it becomes established. With a weekly watering requirement of 25 gallons per tree, this commitment is no small feat.
Trees are planted each spring and fall by URI’s GreenSkills team – a green jobs program that employs high school students from Common Ground and Sound School, Yale student interns, and adults from Emerge CT – a local non-profit that trains formerly incarcerated folks with the professional and personal skills they need join workforce and succeed in their reentry.
This year, with the commitment and care of over 300 individual tree adopters, URI’s GreenSkills crews planted 533 trees across every neighborhood of the City.
Caring For Young Trees
During the young trees’ “establishment” years, URI staff will visit each tree three times – twice during the program’s annual summer inspections (one- and two-years post-planting) and once during the winter pruning season (after the tree has been in the ground about five years).
These visits ensure that URI is able promote proper care of newly planted trees, perform critical maintenance, and monitor the success of New Haven’s green investment.
The five-year pruning visit is particularly important, as a few well-placed pruning cuts can pay dividends in reduced maintenance costs and responsibilities years down the road – this is because most structural defects affecting the health and integrity of mature trees can actually be avoided by making a few strategic cuts when the tree is young.
The major objectives of a young-tree structural pruning program are to reduce obstacles for pedestrians and vehicles and to encourage branches with good placement and strong attachments. Structural pruning is particularly important for future “shade trees” – such as oaks, lindens, and planetrees – as they have the greatest potential to provide the critical benefits we depend on and also pose the greatest risk should a large branch fail.
The resulted trees will be stronger, healthier, and more beautiful in the long-run for all New Haveners to enjoy!