Tree Lopping in Strathfieldsaye Without Ruining the Tree

Before we talk about saws, we need to talk about driveways. Tree lopping in Strathfieldsaye is mostly acreage work, and getting a chipper, a truck and sometimes an elevated work platform to a tree at the back of a hectare block is half the planning. The other half is making the cuts so the tree is still worth having in ten years.

Getting the gear to the tree on a Strathfieldsaye block

The long drives off Strathfieldsaye Road, Emu Creek Road and Tannery Lane are the first thing we ask about on the phone. How wide is the gate? Is there a cattle grid? Low branches over the drive that a truck towing a chipper will not clear? Electric tape on the horse paddocks to unhook? Room to turn near the tree? None of these are problems, but they decide which truck comes and how long we allow.

The ground matters as much. Strathfieldsaye sits in the Sheepwash Creek catchment, where the soils shed water rather than soak it up, and paddocks near a dam can be soft from June to September. If a truck would leave ruts we park it on the hard stand and bring the timber out with the mini loader. A tree on a stony ironbark rise is the opposite: firm ground, nowhere level for a platform, so it gets climbed.

The newer seven-to-nine-hundred-square-metre blocks in estates such as Tannery Fields have the opposite problem: side access a metre wide, so the chipper stays on the street, branches are dragged out by hand and ply goes down over paths and turf. We warn the neighbours, because the chipper is not quiet.

Why we will not top a tree, and what we do instead

Topping, which is what lopping meant for decades, is cutting limbs off at whatever height suits and leaving stubs. The tree answers with a mass of epicormic shoots from below each cut. They are attached only to the outer wood, they grow faster and denser than the original crown, and behind them the stub is rotting because it cannot seal. Within a few years the tree is taller than when you started, weaker at every join and decaying from the top. Yellow gum and grey box do this with real enthusiasm.

Crown reduction to AS 4373 shortens each limb back to a living side branch big enough to take over as the new end. The cut sits just outside the branch collar so it seals, the tree keeps its outline at a smaller size, and regrowth is normal rather than frantic. We take a modest proportion in one visit and return once the tree has settled if more is wanted. Where the reduction being asked for is so heavy the tree could not recover, we say so, and the conversation turns to tree removal in Strathfieldsaye instead.

On acreage most of this is done from a rope, because a climber can move around a crown and make the right cut from the right side. If you have wondered what holds the climber up, the knots a climbing arborist relies on are worth a look.

The trees people ask us to reduce around Strathfieldsaye

Remnant Box-Ironbark trees make up most requests: yellow gum on the lower slopes shedding limbs over sheds and stable roofs, grey box in the gullies with long horizontal limbs over a house, yellow box on the creek flats grown one-sided towards the light. Red ironbark on the rises seldom needs reducing, but it holds deadwood, and a reduction often becomes a deadwooding job halfway up.

Then there are the planted trees from the hobby-farm decades: sugar gum and cypress windbreaks that have outgrown their purpose, pepper trees over stable yards, claret ash and pin oak never meant to reach a shed roof. In the estates near Emu Creek, retained remnant trees stand close to new homes and the request is nearly always to get the canopy off the roof: a reduction on the house side plus a crown lift, not a topping. With the Mandurang bush of the Greater Bendigo National Park to the south and the bushfire overlay over much of the rural living land, canopy separation from the roof line is a sensible reason to reduce, and we are asked about it every autumn.

How a Strathfieldsaye lopping job runs, step by step

1. The phone call. Tell us the species if you know it, how close it is to what, and what the drive is like.
2. The site visit. An arborist walks the tree with you, points out which limbs are doing the damage, and agrees how much to take. You get a fixed price.
3. The overlay check. We confirm whether the City of Greater Bendigo needs a permit under a bushfire, vegetation or environmental overlay, and handle the paperwork if it does.
4. Set-up on the day. Chipper positioned, exclusion zone marked, tape and gates sorted, drop zone cleared.
5. The reduction. The climber works from the top down, cutting to laterals, lowering anything that cannot be dropped, and deadwooding as they go.
6. Chip, stack, tidy. Brush chipped, timber cut to firewood length or removed, ground raked, fences reconnected, and a walk around the tree with you.

What a typical Strathfieldsaye reduction looks like

Two grey box on a two-hectare block off Tannery Lane, both leaning over a Colorbond shed with the ute and the tractor inside. The owner's words were "take the tops off". What we do is reduce the shed side of each crown by about a fifth, back to strong laterals, lift the lowest limbs clear of the roof, and strip the deadwood. Two climbers, a ground worker, half a day. Chip in a pile behind the shed for the garden, firewood stacked beside it to season. The trees still look like grey box; they just no longer touch the roof.

The same approach applies to tree lopping in Junortoun to the north, tree lopping around Axedale where we are based, and tree lopping in Bendigo proper. If the job is about deadwood or clearance rather than size, see tree pruning in Strathfieldsaye; for a cypress windbreak, start with hedge trimming in Strathfieldsaye. The main tree lopping service page goes further into the standard, and the Strathfieldsaye suburb page covers the rest of what we do here.

Tree lopping in Strathfieldsaye: the questions we get on the phone