Tree Service in Courtice, Ontario

Where we work in Courtice

All of it. Courtice is not big, and we are the next community east, so this is the shortest drive we make. The subdivisions off Trulls Road and Courtice Road, the older stretch along Nash, the streets between Bloor and Highway 2, the newer builds south toward the lake and Darlington, and the rural roads out toward Hancock and Townline.

Because it is so close, getting to Courtice is quick. If a limb comes down on a Sunday it is a ten minute drive, not an hour.

The hedgerow problem, which is the Courtice problem

Courtice went from farmland to subdivision quickly, mostly through the eighties, nineties and two thousands, and the fields were built over rather than cleared flat. What that left behind is old fence-line hedgerow running through the middle of established neighbourhoods, and the trees in a hedgerow are not landscape trees. They are whatever seeded itself along a wire fence and was never touched: Manitoba maple, elm, wild cherry, ash, buckthorn and the odd big silver maple.

Manitoba maple is the one that causes the most trouble. It grows fast, forks low into several competing stems, holds those stems together with included bark rather than proper wood, and then drops one of them onto a shed in the first serious wind. It is not a bad tree so much as a tree that was never structurally sound to begin with, and by the time it is fifty feet over a fence it has three or four unions any arborist would look at twice.

These trees are also almost always on the property line, which means they are legally the concern of both neighbours. We are happy to quote a hedgerow job with both parties there so everybody hears the same thing at the same time and there is no argument later about who agreed to what. It saves a lot of grief, and it means the work gets planned once rather than argued over twice.

Spruce and pine that were planted far too close to the house

The other Courtice pattern is landscape conifers from the first wave of building. Colorado spruce, Norway spruce and Austrian pine went in as three-foot nursery stock right beside the front step, and nobody was thinking about what forty-five feet and a fifteen-foot spread would look like in the same spot.

Now they are into the eaves, over the roof, blocking the front windows and shading the lawn into moss. Spruce does not respond to being cut back the way a deciduous tree does. Take a spruce branch back past the green and it stays a bare stub, because it will not push new growth from old wood. So the honest options are limited: lift the lower skirt to get light and clearance underneath, or take the tree out. Anyone promising to neatly reduce a mature spruce by a third is selling you a permanently misshapen tree.

Cedar hedging is everywhere here too, on nearly every lot line, and most of it has not been touched in years. Cedar has the same rule as spruce about not regrowing from bare wood, which is why an overgrown hedge can be brought back to a line but not back to the width it was fifteen years ago. Details on that are on the hedge trimming page.

Wind off the lake and the ash write-off

South Courtice below Bloor runs down toward Darlington Provincial Park and the lake, and it is open ground with very little in the way of a windbreak. A southwest blow comes across the water and hits those properties with nothing slowing it down. That is where the uprooted spruce and the stripped silver maple limbs turn up after a storm.

Ash was heavily planted through Courtice as a street and yard tree, and emerald ash borer has taken essentially all of the untreated ones. Standing dead ash is brittle, sheds bark, and snaps instead of flexing. We do not climb them once they have been dead a couple of seasons; they come apart by machine. If you have one, the cheapest day to deal with it was last year and the second cheapest is today.

After any real wind, the things worth a same-day call are a fresh lean with heaved ground on the opposite side, a visible crack at a stem union, or a limb hung up in the crown. A hung limb is the one people underestimate. It can sit there for weeks and then come down on a still afternoon with nobody expecting it.

Everything we do in Courtice

Removals, pruning and trimming, stump grinding, hedge and shrub work, lot and brush clearing, roadside and driveway clearance, planting and mulching, and emergency storm response.

Fully insured, proof available before we start, and every job cleaned up properly: chipped, stacked or hauled, and blown off. Free on-site estimates, and if the answer is that your tree is fine and does not need anything done to it this year, that is what we will tell you.

We are based one community east in Bowmanville, and Courtice sits right on the Oshawa boundary at Townline, so we are across both sides of it constantly.