Pictures of the tree in question....

I would leave it. It will give the tree some extra character for a dozen years or so, and after that it wont be much noticable anymore

every leaf is a food making machine ... i would give it a year or two.. before i start removing canopy ....

i agree.. when it is two feet thick.. there wont be any wobble in the trunk ... that is tree time ...

that said.. i dont know how you would accomplish it.. so why mess with it ...

only thing i could think of.. might be to figure out how to give it a good drink in july and august next year ....

go blue.. lol ...

ken

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments! I will leave it alone and others know it will straighten with time :). I like a little character and the elms grow so quickly it should not take too long. I will focus my efforts on watering it in the summer and maintaining a straight leader.

I finally took Ken's advice and planted a small tree! Too bad iI had to clone one to do so!

Go Green! :)

Looks like its in a Spartan landscape...

Could you see the root flare when you planted it?

Go Red, Green & Blue...but not Honolulu blue.

tj

Here's what you need. If it were my part of the country every nearby buck would zero in on the little tree. I would get protection around the elm ASAP.

Nice colors there TJ! Yes the root flare is set just about right. I left a little extra dirt on this year just to keep the root ball in the ground, but will correct in the Spring. It gets really windy in this location.

Great suggestion Sam! I had intended to put a tree tube up around November. I do need some help on how tall it should be though. Should I use a 4 ft one and just bend the lower branches up? Would a cage be better? Between the rabbits and deer I think it would be doomed without!

I've bent lower branches up before to accommodate a winter tree protector and never had any problems result from it. These are branches you are going to remove in the near future anyway. I can't say that I have ever had a deer destroy an elm during rutting season. But that's probably because I have plenty of other more preferable trees nearby. (Quaking aspen, lilac, crabapple, willow...)

I would recommend winter pruning for your tree. A great time to easily see the overall structure without leaves in the way. Not much should have to be removed in the first couple of years but watch out for side branches blowing up into large forks. It can happen quickly as a random low branch sometimes puts out nearly 6 feet in growth.

Since it's close to your house, you can remove a low branch early each spring to raise the crown.

Sometimes an open grown elm can grow into a bottle brush shape, grin. Just don't take much each year, as you slow its growth when you trim off its solar collectors (leaves). I have some where I have wanted wind breaks, so I let these do what they want, and all the red elms are bottle brushes. The white elms are a little better, more vase shaped, but low to fork and very bushy. In a windbreak setting, that's fine. For a specimen yard tree, you do likely want to limb it up slowly to get a straight trunk. I don't know the growth habit of Jefferson, but Valley Forge seedlings tend to be untidy, tall and thin with lots of low branches. The occasional Princeton seedling is tall and thin too, if Valley Forge is the other parent, but they seem more stocky over all. I have one Elmwood tree of seedbearing age but its Valley Forge pollinator seedlings are not started to bloom yet, so I can't offer seeds yet.

Nice to see you with a Jefferson, gotta spead those resistance genes around, grin.