Hurricane season started June 1st and you just realized you haven’t touched your trees yet. The big oak in the backyard has branches hanging over the roof that you’ve been meaning to deal with since February. There’s a dead section in the pine on the side of the house that’s been there since last fall. You kept putting it off and now you’re watching the weather and wondering if you already missed your chance.
You didn’t. But the time to stop putting it off is right now.
The Season Started But the Window Is Not Closed
The best time to deal with your trees before hurricane season is late winter or early spring. That time has passed. What’s still in front of you is most of June, all of July, all of August and most of September. That’s when Florida storms do their damage. Every week that goes by from here is a week closer to the part of the season that actually puts trees through roofs.
Getting your trees trimmed right now still makes a real difference. A tree that’s been properly trimmed handles wind a lot better than one that hasn’t been touched in years. Dead wood comes off, the canopy gets thinned out, limbs that are hanging over your house get dealt with. That work is worth doing in June just like it’s worth doing in March. The urgency is just higher.
What Actually Needs to Come Off
Not every branch on every tree is something to worry about. What you’re really looking for is the stuff that turns a normal storm into a repair bill.
Dead branches are the first thing. A dead limb doesn’t need a named storm to come down. The afternoon thunderstorms Spring Hill gets almost every day from June through September are enough to send a dead branch through a roof or onto a car. If you can see dead sections in any of your trees those need to be dealt with before anything else.
Anything hanging over your house, your pool cage, your fence or your driveway is next. Those aren’t just storm risks. They’re problems every time the wind picks up. Before a storm they become the thing that costs you money you didn’t plan on spending.
And if you’ve got trees that haven’t been trimmed in years and the canopy is thick and heavy, that’s worth looking at too. A dense overgrown canopy catches wind like a sail. Thinning it out lets wind pass through instead of pushing the whole tree.
Is It Bad to Trim This Close to Storm Season
Some homeowners have heard that trimming trees right before storm season stresses them out and makes things worse. For the trees common in Spring Hill and around Hernando County, live oaks, laurel oaks, slash pines, queen palms, that’s not really how it works. These are mature established trees and they handle trimming fine in the summer.
What you want to avoid is someone coming in and hacking massive sections off all at once because that leaves big fresh wounds that haven’t had time to close. But taking off dead wood, pulling back limbs that are too close to the house and thinning out the canopy is the right call right now. That’s the work that makes a difference before a storm rolls through.
The Trees That End Up Causing the Most Damage
The calls we get after storms in Spring Hill follow the same pattern every time. Dead trees that were still standing because they hadn’t fallen yet. Limbs that had been hanging over a roof for a year or two that finally came down when the wind pushed them. Trees that had been leaning slightly toward a structure and didn’t need much encouragement to go the rest of the way.
None of those are situations nobody saw coming. Every one of them was visible before the storm. The homeowner just hadn’t gotten around to it.
If your trees have dead sections, heavy limbs over your house or anything you’ve been meaning to deal with, now is the time. Not when a storm is two days out on the radar. Now, while there’s still time to handle it right.
If you’ve got limbs already touching or hanging over your roof this covers what that situation actually looks like and why it’s worth dealing with before storm season gets serious. And if a tree on your property is already showing signs it’s in trouble this explains what to watch for before it becomes an emergency.
Spring Hill Tree Specialists handles tree trimming, tree removal and stump grinding throughout Spring Hill and all of Hernando County including Brooksville. If you’ve got trees you’ve been putting off, visit our Spring Hill tree service page or call for a free estimate. We’ll come out, take a look and tell you exactly what needs to happen before the next storm comes through.