Tree Service Areas in Hermitage & Mercer County, PA

Hermitage, PA — our home town

We have been working out of Hermitage since 1997, and after this many years you learn a town by its trees. The neighborhoods off East State Street and up through the Shenango Valley Mall side are full of 1950s and 60s ranches and split-levels with silver maples and Norway maples planted right in the front yard. Those trees are now sixty and seventy years old, taller than the house, and sitting directly over a roof, a driveway, or the electric drop. Farther out toward Buhl Farm Park and along the older streets you get the good stuff — big oaks, sugar maples, tulip poplars — trees worth pruning and cabling rather than cutting.

What our trees have to stand up to here is the real story. Hermitage catches the tail end of Erie's lake-effect snow, so we get wet, heavy snow loading in December and January that snaps over-extended limbs clean off. Then there are the freeze-thaw swings, ice on the smaller branches, and spring rains that soak the clay-heavy soil until root plates lose their grip. By July we are into the summer squall line pattern — a 60 mph gust front rolling in off Ohio in the late afternoon. A tree that looked fine all spring goes over because the ground was saturated and the crown was carrying too much sail. That combination is why we run seven days a week and why our phone rings hardest the evening a storm passes through.

Emerald ash borer changed the landscape around here too. Every ash in the Shenango Valley is either dead, dying, or already down, and dead ash is the most dangerous wood we handle — it goes brittle and lets loose without warning. If you have a grey, bark-shedding ash near the house, that is a bucket truck or crane job, not a ladder job.

Mercer County, PA

Mercer County runs from the old mill towns along the Shenango — Sharon, Farrell, Wheatland, Sharpsville — out to farm country around Mercer, Jackson Center, and Stoneboro, and up to the water at Shenango River Lake and Pymatuning. Each of those areas breaks differently. In the mill towns the lots are narrow with alleys behind them, so nothing gets felled; every removal comes down in sections on ropes over a garage roof. Out in the townships there is room to work, but the trees are bigger, the hedgerows are long, and half the ash along the township roads is standing dead.

Near the reservoirs and along the creek bottoms — Neshannock, Wolf Creek, Sandy Creek, the Shenango flats — the ground stays wet and trees root shallow and grow fast. Those are the ones that lift a root plate in a storm and come over whole. If you can see soil heaved at the base of a leaning tree, it is not going to settle back in; that is a removal.

We cover the whole county plus roughly 25 miles out, which pulls in New Castle and Lawrence County to the south, Slippery Rock and the Butler County line to the southeast, the Crawford County towns north of Greenville, and Brookfield and Masury just over in Ohio. Estimates are free everywhere we work, and we haul the wood and brush out — we do not leave a debris pile at the curb.