Tree Pruning in Junortoun: Caring for Remnant Eucalypts

Nearly every acreage block along the McIvor Highway has at least one of them: a grey box or yellow gum with a trunk you cannot get your arms around, left behind when the paddocks were fenced and now shading the house yard. Tree pruning in Junortoun is mostly about keeping those trees safe and healthy for another fifty years, with a growing sideline in the young trees going into the new estates.

Deadwooding a mature eucalypt

Old box trees carry dead branches as a matter of course: some die back in dry years, some are shaded out as the crown grows, some are old storm damage. Dead box wood is dense and heavy and stays up there for years before it falls, which is the problem when the tree is over a driveway, a play area or the roof. Deadwooding means a climber moving through the whole crown and removing dead limbs back to the collar where they join living wood, generally everything over about 25 mm above a target. The climber also gets a close look at every union and hollow on the way through, which is the best inspection a big tree can have.

Crown thinning, and why less is more on box trees

Thinning removes a proportion of the smaller live branches to reduce wind resistance and weight on long limbs and let light through to the ground. On eucalypts we keep it light, rarely more than ten to fifteen per cent of the live crown, because the species respond to heavy thinning by throwing epicormic shoots along the bared limbs, which undoes the work and weakens the structure. It is done evenly through the crown rather than by stripping the interior and leaving tufts on the ends, a habit known as lion-tailing that loads up the limb tips and makes summer branch drop more likely. The tree pruning page for Bendigo covers the standard in more depth.

What pruning cannot do is make a eucalypt safe in the sense of never dropping a limb; healthy gums shed sound branches on hot, still afternoons. Good deadwooding and end-weight reduction take the odds down a long way, and where a tree over a house has structural faults beyond that, we say so, and tree removal in Junortoun becomes the conversation.

Formative pruning in the new estates

McIvor Forest and the other recent subdivisions are full of young garden and street trees in their first few years. This is where a little pruning saves a lot of money later: removing a competing leader so the tree grows one trunk, taking out branches with tight, included-bark unions before they get big, and lifting the lower crown gradually as the tree gains height.

Powerlines and fruit trees

Powercor's lines follow the highway and run up many of the long driveways, and eucalypts are quick to reach them. Vegetation inside the clearance space around live conductors is restricted work; we prune up to the safe limit and tell you where the network's own contractors need to be involved. Plenty of rural-living blocks also have a small orchard, and winter pruning of apples, pears and stone fruit to keep them open, productive and reachable is work we fit in around the bigger trees, usually in July and August.

What is different about pruning in Junortoun

The trees, first. The suburb was cut out of the same box-ironbark woodland that survives in Manning Reserve and the Honeyeater Bushland Reserve, so the mature trees on older blocks are yellow gum, grey box and red box: slow-growing, hard-wooded, prone to hollows and heavy deadwood. The corridor along Splitters Creek depends on them, which is a strong argument for pruning over removal wherever the risk allows.

Fire, second. All of Junortoun sits in the Bushfire Prone Area and parts carry the Bushfire Management Overlay, with the Wellsford forest to the north. Deadwooding and lifting canopy away from the roof reduces fine fuel and ember traps around a house. Pruning to AS 4373 is generally treated more lightly than removal under the planning scheme, but overlays vary block by block, and we check with the City of Greater Bendigo before starting on native trees.

Timing, third. Eucalypts can be pruned year round, but we prefer the cooler months for big deadwooding jobs on acreage: the paddocks have drained enough for the truck, it is before fire restrictions, and the deadwood is down before the summer storms test it. Fruit trees wait for winter dormancy.

A typical pruning day on a Junortoun block

A family on a hectare block between the highway and the O'Keefe Rail Trail has three big grey box in the house yard, one over the trampoline and another reaching towards the powerline on the drive. Two of us spend the day there. The climber deadwoods all three from the top down, taking out a dozen dead limbs, reduces the end weight on the long lateral over the roof, and lightens the side of the third tree nearest the line without entering the clearance space. The groundie chips the brush, cuts the dead limbs into firewood lengths for the owner's stack and rakes the yard. Nothing about the shape of the trees has changed; everything about what could fall on the family has. Owners in the neighbouring suburbs will find the same approach on our tree pruning in Strathfieldsaye and tree pruning at Axedale pages, and the Junortoun page lists the rest of what we do here, including hedge trimming in Junortoun for the windbreaks.

Pruning questions from Junortoun properties