Paid $800 for a tree health service that killed my maple instead

Had a company come out last spring to treat some chlorosis on a mature sugar maple. They dosed it with some kind of soil injection, and by August every single leaf had dropped off. Has anyone else had a so-called treatment do this much damage?

3 comments

3 Comments

lee7227d ago

That tree was probably already dying before they got there.

taylor_young27d ago

Okay, did they accidentally use defoliant instead of fertilizer? Because that's a pretty dramatic reaction for a simple chlorosis treatment. Might be worth checking if your tree got the "extreme pruning" special, just without the actual pruning part.

west.henry26d ago

Man that's rough, sorry about your maple. But I'm actually wondering if maybe the soil injection itself was the problem, not the stuff they put in. @lee72 might be right that it was already heading south, but I've seen cases where the injection tool itself damages the roots or hits a major root flare, opening it up to rot. Especially on mature trees, they can dig into that thin bark layer and cause a whole chain reaction. Same thing happened with a neighbor's oak three years back; the injection site turned into a wet spot that just never healed and the tree shed everything by fall. That's not something people usually check for, but it's worth digging down and looking at where they poked it.