shortleaf2002, that photo looks like the damage I see on many of the maples and other soft wood trees in our area. One of my oaks that is growing with a main leader trunk all the way up had lateral branches, growing off its trunk, broken about 4 feet way from the trunk. Non of them have stripped bark along the part of the branch which was not broken. Also none of the main leader trunk has bark stripped, off like seen on the modified leader trunk in your photo. I am concerned that once all the broken branches of my oaks are pruned back to the break, the side branches will look pretty strange with the short lengths of branches which remain undamaged between where they attached to the trunk and the four feet further-out pruning. My other 30 year old Shumard has a modified leader trunk starting about 8 feet up. On that tree, once the needed massive corrective pruning job is done, this might present a good time to try and shorten one of the leaders so a better main leader can develop. Of course the tree specialist, might tell me it is too late to try such a correction on the tree. I have noticed that all three of my Shumard oaks are most heavily damaged on their north and northeast sides. My Scarlet oak is not protected by any other trees or building on it's north, west or east sides. There is a two story house just 40 feet to the South of this oak, and an enormous cottonless cottonwood tree in the back yard of that neighbor's house, that cottonwood tree is southeast of my Scarlet oak, It does not make sense that the cottonwood or the two story house would have sheltered my Scarlet oak to prevent it from suffering damage. Especially since my 8-9 foot tall Green Giants growing near, in a East west line, but still just south of the Scarlet oak, collected so much ice that their tops bent over toward the north all the way to the ground from the weight of all that ice. That indicates to me that my Scarlet also must have collected as much ice on its north and east sides as my Shumards. Still it's side branches that come off its main leader trunk did not break at all. All around town, I see other shumard oaks with the same type of side branch damage as I have described mine. So that also leads me to think that the damage my shumards suffered was not specific to just my three shumards. Late yesterday afternoon our electricity was restored, and we checked out of the hotel and returned home this morning. Since returning home, I have been busy cleaning out my refrigerator and doing laundry, my DH spent the day at work, and so we have not had time to do anything to the trees yet. Tomorrow it is predicted to rain and Saturday predicted to snow about 2-4 inches. Hopefully, if I am not being unrealist, we can at least do the corrective pruning on my damaged trees by next week, several days prior to Christmas.

not to worry, they should be fine. dutch iris survive our zone 5 winters with no problem. right now we have about half a foot of snow, but it's melting away now. it's less than 5 weeks till spring, so you should be seeing them blooming soon.

I know about the septic tank thing. Ours needs electricity to pump it out into the field. When we had our generator going, DH had to go "lift the lid" every once in a while to see if it needed to run. You really don't want that backing up into your house! Also we have a Buck stove which needs electricity to run the fan. If the electricity goes off, we have to shut the stove down. Our first experience with the stove and a power outage, we opened the stove doors thinking we'd get some heat anyhow - but instead the stove got too hot and we almost had a chimney fire. A neighbor came and told us our chimney was glowing red. Thankfully we have a generator now. It came in very handy last winter when we were without power for 4 days. Even then it is a royal pain stepping over electric cords and having to refuel the generator every 6 to 8 hours. It's not a good idea to run the computer on the generator, but I got sooo bored that I did anyhow!

Hman, I find these articles very interesting as I love the history of what we are growing. For an article I wrote on apples I found out the first RI Greening was grown by a 'Mr. Green' in Middletown, RI in 1650. To this day we have 'Green End' Avenue. The orchards in RI go between shrinking (younger kids don't want the family business) to growing (interested out of town young retirees want to perpetuate the business). Its a funny thing, but that is happening here. Just like our vineyards are growing (too bad they produce horrible wine). The colonials were key to bringing appleseeds to our state but Indians took over by planting orchards. Families then started their own home orchards that grew into a business. "Hard Cider" made the cold winters pass a bit easier. Mrs. G