Hi folks, I'm S.U. Extension Forester Jesse Randall. We're out here on the farm. Couple questions came in and I thought I'd make a short video about how I lift a tree up in terms of pruning those tree branches up, how high do I go, how fast do I do that. And this tree is right at the right time to do that. It's about a 20, 22 foot tall swamp white oak. And I've got these branches now that have started to grow out past my herbicide ring and I keep hitting them with my mower. And that does a lot of damage during the growing season which I don't want to have. It also has reached a diameter of about 5 to 6 inches. So I know it's really put on a lot of girth and it's formed a nice centralized leader and a taper to that tree like it's supposed to have. And these branches have reached my pruning rule which is when they're one inch in diameter up to about 2 inches that's where I target to prune and take them off. The other rule I have when I'm lifting a tree in terms of taking the lower branches and cutting them off, I take that overall height and let's say this tree is 20 feet tall. And it is. I don't want to ever take off more than about a quarter of the overall height. So 20 divided by 4 is about 5 feet. So right here is about 5 feet on this tree. So I can prune these lower branches off and by default I'm going to have enough photosynthetic capacity in the canopy above so that this tree will seal itself off, will compartmentalize the damage of these wounds and don't write on about its business. I pruned one last year on this backside and I'll give you a parting picture of that at the end of the video. But what I want to show you is how I prune in the dormant season I'm going to use a three cut pruning. These branches are big, they're actually heavier than I want to be able to hold with one hand and prune with the other and have it not tear out. And I'll show you a picture of that on the screen right now and what I'm trying to avoid is for the branch to tear down and hurt the stem because any time you do that it's going to take longer for this wound to seal over. So what I'm going to do is I want to take the weight of this branch right off this tree. And I start by telling it where I want this branch to break. All right, so I'm going to cut up underneath it almost the whole way and you can see my saw got a little bit pinched. Okay, so now the weight is off on this branch. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to slowly start cutting and you're going to hear a pop when it breaks. All right, so now it's just broken. It hasn't torn anything out. Now this stub doesn't weigh anything. It's not going to tear out. Now what I have to do is I have to find the branch bark ridge and a branch collar and that's the swell that I need to avoid when I'm pruning. So a lot of folks will come in and they'll just want a flush cut all the way up through. That's going to do is create a much larger wound and I'll show you some photos of that in a minute. So what I'm doing is I'm finding this swell all the way around and I'm telling it or I'm telling myself where I need to cut. And so what I'm doing is I'm lining this up and I'm going to cut right on the outside of that swell. All right, if I hit the swell then the callous cells that would form right here are going to take longer to form and it's going to take longer to seal this wound over. This wound should seal over on an average maybe two to three years. It'll be all sealed up. All right, you can see a little bit of heartwood formation. Every tree is a little different in how it'll form heartwood and we just want to limit the amount of heartwood right here in the middle of that stem. So now what I'm going to do is I want this branch to go as well. Let's reach that one to two inch size capacity and so what I'm going to undercut again out about six inches from it. All right, then I'm going to come on the top side. I'm going to slowly cut, there you go, it broke off, it cracked. You can see that it hasn't torn out anything. I'm going to look at this. The thicker and corkier of the bark, kind of the harder it is to see. So what we see here is a large amount of tissue. You can see how that has swollen and that is the branch bridge and the branch collar. This is the stem where it mates to that. If I came in here and cut like this, I'm going to remove most of the surface area that will form callus tissue. So what I want to do is I want to carefully position my saw right here. I'm about an eighth of an inch outside of that callus area, that ridge in the collar, and that's what I'm going to cut. So I'm just going to do that quick. You can see I'm going to hold the end of this just a little bit. There you go. And so this is the cut surface and what this will do now is a lot of folks will say, well, my goodness, if you would have cut it flush, the tree would have been much better off. It will look better. I guarantee you in five to ten years when we come back and look at this, you will not see these knots. The tree will have grown right out over them and it will have smoothed this area out. That's why we do this. This is the proper way to prune, leaving a little bit of a bulb allows it to seal over that much quicker. All right, so this tree now has been lifted. I don't have to worry about it. What I'm going to do now next year as this tree grows up, I'm going to evaluate these other branches. And if I think they're going to be a problem when they reach that one inch to two inch size class, I'll cut them off. Now this will probably be the next one that I prune if I want to lift this tree up so it doesn't hit me in the head when I walk around or drive a tractor under it. So right now I'm leaving all of these small branches that you see on the stem. These small branches provide a tremendous amount of photosynthase right to the stem that I want to grow in girth. And so with that, that's how we lift the tree. You can over prune trees, so caution on that one. You never lift more than a quarter of the overall height and I'll show you a diagram on that next. But right now this tree is going to seal this up in probably two to three growing seasons you shouldn't see a wound there anymore.