Growing Together: A Gardening Podcast · Forum Communications Co.

Fall is a perfect time to assess the health of your trees and shrubs

·47 min·3 clips

A basswood with a 10-foot trunk circumference looked healthy but was hollow inside.

1. Growing Together: A Gardening Podcast uses late fall to assess tree and shrub health by reading bare twigs and buds. 2. Hosts John Lamb and Don Kinsler, a lifelong gardener and North Dakota State University Extension Horticulturist in Cass County, guide the episode’s practical tree-checking advice. 3. The episode asks what clues bare branches give about whether a tree, shrub, or perennial is healthy. 4. Don says fast-growing trees, including poplars and cottonwood, can add 2 to 3 feet in a summer. 5. He places elm, ash, and silver maple in that fast-growth group when they are young. 6. He defines medium-growth trees such as hackberries, birch, walnut, honey locust, lindens, and young non-bearing fruit trees as growing 1 to 2 feet per year. 7. He describes slow-growing trees, including oaks, ironwood, buckeye, and bearing-age fruit trees, as normally adding 8 to 12 inches annually. 8. Don says older trees usually grow more slowly than young trees, using elm as an example of a tree that fills out with age. 9. He ties reduced growth to stress factors such as drought, disease, insects, and poor site conditions. 10. Don then explains a twig-based method: start at the outer tip and look back to the first round growth scar to measure one year of growth. 11. He says the space between growth scars shows how much that branch grew in each previous season. 12. He notes that you can count those scars to estimate the age of a branch, even though that does not tell you the tree’s full age. 13. Don uses a failing tree with only an inch or two of annual growth to show how the method reveals stress. 14. He says blooming lilacs in September or October often coincided with severe defoliation from fungal leaf disease in a wet year. 15. He explains that lilacs can bloom out of season as a stress response and says healthy buds should look plump, moist, and green inside. 16. Don also recommends the scratch test, where green cambium under the bark indicates life and brown tissue indicates dead wood. 17. He adds that evergreen buds should be sticky and sappy, and he says spruce can be aged roughly by counting its yearly whorls of branches. 18. The tone is practical and conversational, with John and Don moving between examples, listener mail, and step-by-step field checks. 19. Gardeners, homeowners, and people with young trees or lilacs would get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting quick flower talk without tree-health diagnostics may skip it.

As heard by us

Fall yard work turns into a clear lesson in reading tree health from roots, twigs, and growth.

The conversation starts with mulch and hosta cleanup, then settles into a plain but useful reminder that tree problems often show up long before the canopy looks wrong.

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Why you'd press play

You can read a tree's health from its twigs once the leaves are down.

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