Tree Service in Auburn, KS

The F5 that ran through Topeka on June 8, 1966 formed in the southwest corner of Shawnee County, near Auburn, around seven in the evening. It went on to cross Burnett's Mound, cut a path of roughly twenty-two miles through the city and the Washburn campus, kill seventeen people, and destroy more than eight hundred homes. Auburn was the beginning of that track, not the middle of it.

That geography is not a coincidence. Storms coming across the open upland southwest of Topeka organize on the way in, and rural property on this ground takes the leading edge of wind that the city gets after it has already crossed several miles of buildings. For a farmstead here that means the windbreak, the hedge row, and the pasture timber are the first structures the wind meets. Trees on the southwest corner of a property are the ones we look at hardest, because they carry loads that trees on the sheltered side of the same place will never see.

Auburn sits south of the Kansas River in the Osage Cuestas, a landscape of limestone and shale ridges with valleys between them, draining toward the Wakarusa. This is upland, not river bottom, and the difference shows in the trees. On a ridge, soil depth over rock can be limited, which means a root system spreads wide and shallow because it has nowhere else to go.

Trees on thin soil over limestone tend to hold well through dry years and then let go under a combination of saturated ground and hard wind, because there is no deep anchor to fall back on. Bur oak and Osage orange do this ground better than most species, which is why they dominate the hedge and the pasture timber. Eastern redcedar does it well enough to become a problem, seeding into pasture from bird-carried fruit and steadily taking over ground that used to be grass.

Most of the work out here is measured in acres rather than in trees. Forestry mulching handles cedar encroachment and brushy fence lines in a single pass and leaves the material on the ground as mulch, which is the outcome most landowners want anyway. Larger trees get cut and either mulched or stacked for firewood. What we do not do is push material into a pile and leave it for someone else to deal with.

Inside city limits the code still applies. Auburn's ordinance gives the city the right to cause removal of dangerous, dead, or diseased trees on private property when they are a hazard to life and property, handles notice through a police officer or certified mail, and puts the chief of police in charge of getting the work done if an owner does not comply. Cut material from a diseased tree has to be treated, removed, or burned immediately rather than sitting on the premises. The city covers the cost of removing dead trees within a public right of way. Burning anything in Shawnee County requires an open burning permit.