How Having Too Many Trees Can Be Bad For Your House

"What!?" That's what someone who has never lived around a lot of trees might ask if you told them too many trees could be bad for your house. "What? You can never have too many trees!" While that's easy to say, the truth is that having too many trees can be bad for your house if you do not upkeep them and provide the proper maintenance required to having a lot of trees around your home.

Some easy examples of maintenance required by having trees is raking the lawn, dealing with more insects and pests, dealing with pollen on the car, dealing with sap on the driveway, dealing with fallen branches and bird poop everywhere. Yes, having trees around your home adds a lot of responsibilities, but none of these responsibilities I mentioned so far are necessarily bad for your home. The culprit we're going to talk mainly about today, the biggest responsibility every home owner has if they live under a bunch of trees, is the damage trees cause to your roof. And trees cause damage to your roof in a plethora of ways.

So, we can all agree having trees all around your home, while it's beautiful, results in many more chores for the dwellers to achieve each year, such as raking and cleaning bird poop. But if your roof is under a tree canopy, which causes shady, moist areas on your roof for fungi and lichen to grow undisturbed, then we're no longer talking about mere annoying chores. If you have so many trees that moss, lichen, algae, and other fungi are spreading across your roof shingles, then we're talking about something much more serious than annoying chores. Yes, we're now talking about possibly expensive roof repairs if the problem is not delt with accordingly.

To make this long story short, having too many trees can be horrible for the health of your home's roof if you let the leaves and debris collect with moss and fungi on your roof shingles. Moss has a hard time growing in direct sunlight, and that's why tree cover, or spots of shade on your roof caused by tree canopies overhanging your eaves and gutters, is the cause of this phenomena. The solution is where tree service experts like us come into play. We're often called in to remove branches and trees that are overhanging people's roof, to reduce the risk of moss growth as well as to remove the risk of damage to your home by falling branches. It might look cool if all the trees around your home are leaning over your roof with beautiful branches, but these branches can become dangerous in a wind storm, and so it's best to prune and remove dangerous trees.

When all the trees that are overhanging your roof are removed, the trees still standing tall nearby might be blocking the sunlight from your roof, though, and so this would mean you still have a risk of moss, lichen, and other fungi from spreading and damaging your roof shingles. Some home owners deal with this problem in a way that means you don't have to go out and cut down all those trees. We recommend having a good balance of sunlight and tree cover on your property, for privacy, diversity, and wildlife, but it's still possible to prevent damage to your home even if your house is surrounded in tall trees, and this is done by simply keeping up with the maintenance. If you hire a professional roof cleaning company once or twice a year that should be enough to keep most moss off your roof and therefore avoid permanent roof damage. This is a reasonable option because some people love living around a bunch of trees, even if it means they have more chores to do every year. And if you decide not to cut back or remove the trees allowing moss to riddle your roof, then cleaning your roof and trimming the trees back will be a necessary task to do every year to avoid damage to your home. Therefore, in other words, the biggest risk to your home is not the trees or the moss per se but rather you failing to do your annual chores. So get to it!

If you're in Nanaimo BC or a surrounding area and want help trimming back your trees, then contact Tree Service Nanaimo today. We'll be glad to help!