There’s a lot of talk these days on the usage of chemicals vs organic tree treatments. The first thing we say is that you will receive different answers from different people. How someone diagnoses and manages your tree comes from a lot of varying characteristics, but the primary contributor is the culture they were taught and continue to learn. Most arborists and tree service culture involves spraying and fertilizing as their primary tools. This is because it is simple, and they can make a lot of money fast. If your culture is more geared towards organic principles, you’ll find most treatments are changes to the environment. The only problem is that it can take a long time to fix and be rather expensive. This, however, does not mean that chemicals don’t have their place, or that I don’t utilize them regularly. Chemical usage can be integral to the treatment program and protocol we are following for your overall tree health and they have their place.
The more you study and come to learn about trees, the more you will realize that most problems start as environmental or physiological, or also known as organic chemistry. Knowing that organic-based principles address the key issues of causation, you naturally start to use them over chemicals that primarily only treat symptoms or deficiencies in your tree. Most certified arborists and tree services only see the symptoms, “looking for what’s wrong with the tree and what’s happening to it.” With organic-based culture, we look first for “what is supposed to be correct,” then determine why the tree has the symptom or deficiency. Without understanding “why,” you never get to the source of the problem and are stuck in a never-ending loop of tree treatments and monetary loss because, most of the time, the tree will just die.
Organic tree treatments really work because they focus on the biology of your tree and the micro climate it lives in. Most of the time, when there’s something wrong with your tree, it can naturally take care of itself. That’s why trees can live so long! A lot of the time, something we did caused the problems: The number one contributor to the death of a tree is people!