Tree Service in Dundalk, MD

What Tree Work Do Properties Around Here Usually Need?

Four jobs cover nearly everything we get called out for. A tree is dead, leaning, or grown too close to the house and has to come out completely. A healthy tree has put too much weight over a roof or a power drop and needs that weight taken off before the weather takes it off. A takedown has left a stump sitting in the middle of a small lawn. Or something came down in the night and is lying across a car.

• Tree Removal Dead, split, leaning, or simply too big for the lot.
• Tree Trimming Weight off the roof, clearance off the wires, deadwood out.
• Stump Grinding Ground below grade so you can seed it or plant over it.
• Emergency Tree Removal Storm damage, blocked drives, limbs hung up over the house.

Why Do Trees Fail on This Side of the Water?

The ground here is the short answer. This is coastal plain soil, sandy and loose through the top couple of feet and then heavy clay underneath, and a lot of the older streets sit on fill that was pushed around when the war housing went up in the 1940s. Roots spread wide and shallow because there is no reason for them to go deep. Close to Bear Creek and Back River the water table sits high enough that the bottom of the root plate stays wet most of the year, which rots the anchoring roots without a single sign showing up in the canopy.

Then the wind gets a clean run at it. There is nothing between open water and these neighborhoods to slow a gust down. A nor'easter pushes for two days straight and works a saturated root plate loose. A summer microburst does it in ninety seconds. Tropical remnants coming up the bay have taken out whole blocks of mature trees in a night, and the ones that go are almost never the ones anybody was worried about.

Species matters too. Half the big shade trees on these streets are silver maple and Norway maple planted in the fifties, and both are notorious for weak branch unions and sudden limb drop once they get past fifty years old. Pin oaks are dying off from bacterial leaf scorch, which browns the leaf margins every August and kills the tree over five or six years. The ash are already gone. Bradford pears split down the middle on their own schedule. Salt carried in on the wind off the water finishes off anything already stressed.

How Do You Know a Tree Has Become a Problem?

Most failures give you warning if you know where to look. Walk the base of the tree first. Mushrooms or shelf fungus growing out of the trunk flare or the surface roots mean decay is already inside the wood, and by the time fruiting bodies show up, a good bit of the structural wood is gone. Soil cracked or heaved on one side of the trunk means the root plate has started to lift.

Look up next. A crack running vertically where two big stems meet is the classic failure point on maples and pears. Bare limbs holding no leaves in June are dead and will come down eventually, and they usually pick a windy night to do it. A canopy that leafs out thin and pale on one side, or that drops leaves in early August while the neighbors are still green, is a tree in decline. Any lean that has changed since last year is worth a call, even if the tree looks fine otherwise.

None of this means the tree has to come out. Quite often the fix is taking weight off the limbs that overhang the roof so the tree can carry itself again. Sometimes it does mean bringing the whole thing down, and it is better to make that call on a Tuesday than at midnight in the rain.

What Makes One Tree Cost More Than the Next?

Height and trunk diameter set the floor, because they decide how much wood has to come down and get carried out. After that it is almost entirely about what is underneath the tree and how close it sits to something expensive.

A tree in an open side yard with a gate wide enough to drive through can be dropped in whole pieces and is straightforward work. The same tree hemmed in by a house on one side, a fence on the other, and a service drop running through the canopy has to be taken down piece by piece and roped to the ground, and that can easily double the time on site. Utility lines are the single biggest cost factor on these lots. Dead trees cost more than live ones, because dead wood is unpredictable to climb and often has to be reached from a bucket instead.

Access for the chipper matters as much as the tree does. Where the crew can back a truck down the alley, brush goes straight in. Where everything has to be carried through a basement walkout or around the block by hand, that is labor. Stump work, haul-away of the trunk wood, and any repair to a gate or a bed we have to open up are usually priced separately so you can see what you are paying for.

How Do You Get a Crew Into a Backyard Behind a Rowhome?

Carefully, and usually through the alley. The blocks of brick rowhomes and duplexes built for the steel workers share rear alleys that are barely one vehicle wide, with overhead wires running the length of them. A full-size chipper truck does not always fit, and where it does, it often cannot turn around.

So we scope the approach before we quote, not on the morning of the job. That means looking at gate widths, whether the fence is on a footer, where the meter and the gas line sit, and how low the service drop hangs across the yard. On the tightest properties we rig everything down in small pieces to a tarp and carry it out, and on the postwar Cape Cods and ranchers with a driveway down the side we can usually get equipment right up to the trunk. Either way you find out which one it is during the estimate, along with what we will need to move and what the yard will look like when we are finished.

What Happens to the Wood and the Mess?

It leaves unless you want it. Brush and small limbs go through the chipper. Trunk wood gets cut to length and loaded out. If you burn, say so and we will cut rounds to whatever length your stove takes and stack them where you want them, which costs nothing extra and saves us a trip.

Then we rake. Sawdust gets blown off the walk and the drive, the lawn gets cleared of chips, and anything we moved goes back where it was. If the stump is staying for now we cut it low and flush so you are not catching a mower blade on it. If it is going, we grind it out below grade and you can decide whether to keep the grindings as mulch or have them hauled.

Are You Licensed and Insured?

Yes, and you should ask every company that gives you a number. Maryland licenses tree care, and the license exists because untrained crews put trees into houses. We carry general liability and workers' compensation, and we will send the certificates over before the crew shows up if you want them on file.

The reason it matters is simple. If an uninsured cutter drops a limb through your roof, or one of his people gets hurt in your yard, that can land on your homeowners policy. A cash-only crew with a pickup and a chainsaw after a storm is the most expensive tree service in the state, and nobody finds that out until afterward. Ask to see paperwork, and if it does not come, keep calling.