As the weather improves, many homeowners are anxious to get outside and clean up their property.
One of the bigger tasks is taking care of trees that went through a miserable winter and may now need some tender loving care.
That’s where the professionals come in, says Andrew Smit, general manager and consulting arborist with Treescape Canada.
“It is a very dangerous task getting up and removing debris from a tree. Certainly, the professionals have the equipment, the skills, the knowledge, the training to do that stuff efficiently and safely,” he said while on a job site in north Peterborough.
About half of Treescape’s business is commercial, the other half residential.
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Smit says now is the perfect time for homeowners to look around their property to see how their trees survived.
“The leaves not being on the trees is the perfect opportunity to kind of assess the internal structure of the trees’ crown, to check for dead, dying, diseased wood,” he said. “We had a lot of really heavy winds, a lot of snow and ice loading over the winter so there’s a good chance that there might be some broken branches or some damaged branches there that need to be addressed.”
And with the arrival of spring comes an awakened real estate market.
“If you’re looking at a home and think you might be interested in making an offer but you see that there’s a tree that could be a nuisance or a hazard or could cause some damage to your home, you can always be proactive and maybe bring an arborist along on your home inspection,” said Catherine Hanrahan, Salesperson with Century 21. “When it comes to property rights, you do definitely go to a lawyer first,”