So as proof that we can learn and advance our skills, with great pride I want to show you our newest technique for cabling some autumn blaze maples. Cameron of Lundin Tree Care was not super impressed when I told him about our new technique. “I’ve been doing it that way for a while now.” Well, I'm glad we caught up!
Anyways, you can see the four sides of the cable that form a basket or loop in the upper 1/3 of the tree. We are moving towards this style because so often the tops of these type of maple are loaded with vertical growing trunks. Putting a basket around all the trunks helps to prevent any of them failing during a storm event. The conventional way would be to install cables between two trunks. Autumn blaze is notorious for many, many trunks (leaders) which means lots of cables going between the many leaders.
Installing the basket around all of the leaders solves this problem and protects the entire center of the tree. It might not be completely visible in the photo, but we did do a pretty extensive train prune on the tree before installing the basket. The last reason that this technique works is because the tree is relatively small at this point. In ten years the tree will be much bigger/taller and require a different system to hold it together.
