Peter Gerstenberger: Hi! I'm Peter Gerstenberger, I'm Senior Advisor for Safety Compliance and Standards with the Tree Care Industry Association. I'm here to talk to you today about tree care basics.

In this video series, we're going to look at things, such as how the placement of trees around your home or your business can help you save on energy bills. We're going to look at ways of properly planting trees. We're going to look at how we can go about observing our trees and diagnosing tree disorders. We're going to look at ways that we can mitigate or reduce storm damage by proper tree care and what we can do after a storm to restore a tree to health. Then finally, we're going to look at how we go about hiring professional to care for those tasks that we can't accomplish ourselves with our trees.

I encourage you to take an active interest in the trees in your landscape and there are some tasks for those trees that you can accomplish yourself. In order to accomplish those tasks, you may want a couple of simple tools, such as a good pair of hand snips or hand pruners. Preferably, the scissor type action that I have here, a larger version of this same tool is called a lopper and it has a longer handle, also very helpful for a lot of household tasks. If you get even more serious, you may want a good pruning saw.

A little unsafety, however, generally, as a rule of thumb, I would recommend to homeowners that if the task involves you climbing a ladder, or if the task involves you starting a chain saw, or even worse, if the task involves doing both of those at the time, then it's probably time to hire a tree care professional.

I have been a tree care professional for over 30 years in my career. I started out working in the field, climbing trees. For the last 25 years, I've worked for the Tree Care Industry Association, where we provide a variety of different training opportunities for folks in the industry, and a variety of different types of information to help them do their jobs more professionally.

So, let's get started on tree care basics.