So today we're out here at the farm, my name is Jesse Randall, I'm the ISU Extension Forester. We have a series of oak trees and in the last video we talked about when to prune our oaks and when not to and what equipment to use. And today we're faced with a series of different problems with our oaks. These are open grown oak trees. You can tell it's just starting to slit and snow, it's a perfect day to be out here pruning our trees. If you look at this tree and you look at the very top of it, we have a very classic problem in open grown trees. They develop a double liter. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to climb up this ladder and again carefully use the ladder. I'm looking at that double liter as a problem. And that's going to be a weak point as this tree grows older. And I need to make a decision about maintaining a dominant central liter. And so I evaluate both of these branches that are vying for dominance. And really the problem that arises in the future happens right here. This point will grow bigger and bigger and the bark that sandwiched between these two branches as those branches gets bigger, the bark that's included in there gets bigger and bigger. What we know is bark does not hold up trees. The wood holds up trees. So the longer that I can maintain a central dominant liter, the better off I'll be. And so I look at this and almost always one liter will show signs of having other problems. And I look up and this liter is really a well formed, it's a single stemmed liter. On this side it's already split about two feet up into another double liter. And so Mother Nature has told me which one to prune. I'm going to leave this one as my new liter and prune this one. And so now we have to decide, one, how am I going to prune this? Can I use my small hand loppers? Probably not on this burrow. Is it big enough or is it too big for me to use the handsaw? No, actually it's on the smaller side. My handsaw on this one's going to cause a lot of problems mainly because this top's going to move back and forth on me. And so really I'm down to using my pass loppers. And I see a lot of folks ask, well what side of the loppers do I use? Am I going to hold the loppor like this? Or am I going to hold the loppor like this? What I always say is you keep the blade, the sharp blade side toward the stem that's going to remain. Right? It does a lot less mechanical damage than what it's cutting against, what I call a modified anvil that it's slicing against. Up here what I'm looking for is the branch bark ridge and the branch collar. And it's awfully hard to see on a young tree like this with this thick corky bark. But I don't want to hit that ridge in collar area because that's where those callous cells will form and seal over this wound. And so basically I'm just going to come in here. I'm going to try to line up and not hurt anything else. And it takes a little time to get it positioned. I'm going to come in here like this, get one more hire on me. And you can see that I'm stuck on a branch back here so I can't always make the cleanest cut that I want. But here we go. I'm just going to use those loppers. I make one cut and now I do have an open wound here because it's in the winter time. This will have a period where the tree will begin to dry that wound out. That's the first phase that this tree has to go through to get the signal that it needs to form callous cells. So it's going to dry out. It's also going to dry out well in advance of when those in that adoolid beetles will be flying out and around. And when the active oak wilt spormats are going to be flourishing. And so right now this tree has a really good chance of developing a nice dominant leader. And we may have to come back and check this tree next year. But right now that's all I want to do on this tree. This tree's roughly 10, 12 feet tall and that's all I'm going to worry about right now. Everything else has to be done to it. It's developed a really nice strong central leader. It's got beautiful taper to it. You can see on the bottom I've had to put a tree shelter on it only because of of deer damage that we have out here. You can see that I've killed the lawn all the way around this in about a two to three foot circle. And this tree is doing incredibly well. It started as a bare root seedling that we stuck in the ground a few years ago. And now I have a really nice well shaped oak tree.