I live in an area with Tamaracks, Northern Firs and Aspens. Last fall I cleared out a relatively small area that had both Aspens and Firs in it and put down landscape cloth and rock around the trees to prevent weed growth. So far there have been few weeds, but the Aspen’s roots are sending up shoots all over the place. I don’t want to injure the Aspens, but I want to manage these shoots so they don’t develop into saplings (I have plenty of trees to take care of already thank you).
Other than digging out the rocks and trimming these shoots by hand is there an easier way to handle this? Could I use roundup to kill the shoots without injuring the tree? Is there a better/smarter way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated!
Dolphinboy - Aspens in a grove are actually not multiple individuals but one big organism. As a matter of fact, the oldest and largest living organism on the planet* is an aspen grove in Utah. Cite
*there are others in contention for the largest and oldest, but at very least its several thousand years old.
Anyway, back to the aspen. What it sounds like you have is one grove, or one individual tree that is actually growing underground, like they all do. So when you trim it at ground level, it will simply regrow somewhere else. If you use round-up, you are likely to get the same thing. One thing that is a bit of a wives tale out here in Colorado, is nailing a copper nail in each shoot. It actually infects the rest of the tree.
Not being a cutter of many trees for reasons that have to do with a deep seeded affinity for trees, I can’t really say how to completely erraticate them. But if you call an arborist in Colorado - Here is a list- I’m sure they can tell you how to do it.
The only thing to do is to keep the undesired shoots cut short. A heavy duty string trimmer works well. You can’t kill the shoots (we call them “suckers”) without harming the trees you want to keep. Remember that aspens only live 20-30 years so let some new ones grow to replace the ones which will die. Around here the usual cause of death is fungus.
Quite often, when a tree is putting out volunteers (from roots), one or two of them can become more vigorous than others. You can (hopefully) find a few sprouts in acceptable area and let those grow out awhile and clip all the others aggressively (no chemicals as they all share same roots as mentioned). After a period of time, the tree’s vasculature will adjust to the new set-up (lack of better word) and there should be less growth/aggressiveness from the root-sprouts. Its normal for a tree to put out lots of new growths, especially if there has been trauma to tree or such (drought, pruning, soil disturbances, etc…) but generally just a few of these new growths will become sizable as the roots can’t keep up with all the new growths perpetually. Chances are, even if you did nothing, most of the new shoots would not be too vigorous once a few of them start growing faster than others. Clipping off the others will help speed this up for you, imho. Hope that makes sense
