Save our house! How to stake and guy a tall tree

April 26, 2022 7:29 AM

We live at a high elevation and the winds can be quite terrible, especially in recent years. I just noticed that the dry ground just to the west of one of the trees near our house is showing cracks after a recent windstorm. Our winds are predominately westerly. If this tree blows down, it will do major damage to our house.

It is an approximately 50 foot tall fir. We don't want to remove the tree, as it provides necessary shade and a home for many birds. So, I'd like to try to use stakes and straps to prevent it from falling during high winds.

The only information I could find online is about staking and strapping newly planted and shorter trees. Does anyone here have any experience with taller, mature trees? I assume I will likely only need two straps anchored widely and loosely (for slack) to the west of the tree, but I don't know how far up the tree to anchor the straps, how far out to stake them, or what kind of straps and stakes to use. Actually, any advice at all would be great! Thanks.

posted by Don_K to Home & Garden (6 answers total)

Can you hire an arborist to advise you? I think it’s unlikely that stakes and lines will be effective support if soil and roots fail with a tree that age and height. Even if the straps held, and prevented the tree from falling, lines under tension can be really dangerous and then you’ve got those and a tree dangling in the air to deal with.
posted by stellaluna at 7:38 AM on April 26, 2022 [17 favorites]

The best advice I can give here is to get an experienced arborist out to check out the tree. They’ll be able to assess the actual risk and what mitigation options there are, if needed. Trees are way heavier than we think and even if restraints were a good option here, which I suspect they are not, they’d probably have to be far burlier than you’re thinking with actual deeply sunk anchors, not simple stakes. I wouldn’t do anything without an expert opinion.
posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 7:38 AM on April 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

After some research into doing this for an old, cracking, and deeply beloved silver maple that looms over half my house, I hired an arborist to cable it and adjusted my home insurance policy to increase my damage coverage. I'm not trying to be snarky, I just calculated that the $1200 one-time cost of the arborist and the $80 additional yearly on my insurance was far less than the cost of any DIY job of mine failing.
posted by minervous at 7:40 AM on April 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

Nthing professional. It can probably be cut waaaay back while still functioning as shade and habitat.
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 8:07 AM on April 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

And cutting back doesn't necessarily mean removing the upper reaches of the tree, it can just be a means of letting wind pass through easier and minimizing the chance of it being blown over.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:10 AM on April 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure where all the arborists practice their trade, but in rural northern New England we call a "tree service" for this. (I live in a pretty big town in New Hampshire and there are no arborists here.) I only say this in case you can't find any arborists either.
posted by nosila at 12:54 PM on April 26, 2022