Sometimes one live oak tree doesn’t look as good as the other live oaks on your property or around the neighborhood. When I say “live oak” here in Wilmington, North Carolina, or anywhere in the surrounding Greater Cape Fear Region, I’m talking about Quercus virginiana, the southern live oak tree. If you have a live oak, or a few of them, with pale leaves, sparse leaves, or lots of deadwood, fertilization can be a great way to help your oak turn around and thrive!

Give me a call or fill out my contact form, and I’ll be happy to check out your trees to see if fertilization can help you.

Live oaks are hearty and generally live for a very long time. If you want to see some really spectacular live oaks, there are many places throughout the south where you can visit them up close. The most common problems with struggling live oaks start in the roots and soil. I use three different methods to fertilize live oaks, depending on the tree size and the situation: Deep Root Soil Injections, Root Flare Injections, and Root Drenching. All three methods can be combined with pesticides if necessary and appropriate.

I like to joke that live oaks are the George Burns or Keith Richards of oak trees. They are charismatic and are very long-lived. They just keep going and going. They are slow-growing, the wood is dense and strong, and they are very resistant to pests and to decay. If they do get decay in one section, they are very good at compartmentalizing that decay to protect adjacent living tissue. Because of all this, live oaks can live to be many hundreds of years old. If you’re going to have a large tree near your house, a live oak is an excellent choice.

The two most famous live oaks around here are the Airlie Oak at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, NC, and the Angel Oak just outside of Charleston, NC. They are both massive, impressive, and worth the visit. There are also many impressive live oaks on the UNCW campus (University of North Carolina, Wilmington), and in the lovely town squares throughout Savanah, GA. There are 370 live oaks in the public areas of Wrightsville Beach, NC, which includes “The Walking Loop” that surrounds their municipal complex. I know every one of those trees well, because I helped prune them more than once. Those are all great trees worth visiting.

There are a number of reasons why a live oak might struggle. Root damage is the most common. Roots get cut during construction or trenching, roots get crushed by soil compaction from vehicles, roots get both drowned and starved of water from salt water intrusion during high king tides, and roots have trouble finding enough nutrients in the sandy, nutrient poor soil we find here locally. They also have trouble finding enough nutrients in the barren wasteland of fill dirt commonly used during construction. And if fill dirt is used to change the property grade, then roots can get buried and suffocated. You see, a tree is mainly two living systems: the leaf system and the root system. They’re connected by what we call the tree, but that’s is mostly structural and vascular tissue connecting the roots and leaves. The majority of carbohydrates produced by photosynthesis in the leaves is transported down to feed the root system. And the majority of water and minerals collected by the roots is transported up to the leaves to use in photosynthesis. It’s easy to look up and see a struggling canopy of sparse, pale leaves. But whenever you see that, it’s important to look down, because the problem probably starts in the ground. And down in the ground is how we’ll solve it for you.

The fertilization method I use the most often is Deep Root Soil Injections. I mix up the fertilizer in a big tank that is bolted into the back of my F-150 truck (affectionately known as “The Tree Nerds World Headquarters”). I have 300 feet of hose that can reach from the truck to the tree, and I inject a fertilizer mix directly into the soil under pressure throughout the entire root area. The second most common way I fertilize is via Root Flare Injections. This is when I inject concentrated nutrients directly into the vascular system of the tree by drilling very small holes into the trunk just above ground level and using pressurized capsules to deliver whatever mix is appropriate for the situation. The third method is Root Drenching. I mainly use this method on small trees. Root Drenching involves mixing up some fertilizer in a bucket and pouring it right on the ground around the base of the tree.

All three of these methods are can be combined with pesticide treatments. This is much more common with trees that are more prone to insect problems (like crepe myrtles and ornamental magnolias) or fungus problems (like arborvitaes and Leyland cypress evergreens).

As I mentioned at the top, give me a call or fill out my contact form, and I’ll be happy to check out your trees to see if fertilization can help you.