Arbor Day with Mark Miller

The Yard Stop welcomes Mark Miller of Mount Dora to the podcast!

Mark is an urban forester and tree arborist.  We asked him to share his knowledge and tree expertise with us on this episode. Find out why tree canopies are essential for community health and how you can get involved to make a difference.      

https://youtu.be/bQCObBXCRW4https://yardstopgardencenter.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Young Thought Garden Center podcast. I'm your host, Emily, and today our guest speaker is Mark Miller. Mark Miller is an urban forester and tree arborist, and today that's what we're gonna be talking about. He also works for the city of Montblora. Sorry I left that burn out, Mark.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Um Well, thank you, Emily.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Oh yeah. Hope that was a well enough introduction for you to be. That was wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

I thank you for having me uh on your podcast, and thank you very much for being here. But first and foremost, I want to thank Yard Stop because it's been instrumental of Yard Stop working with me since I've been with the city. Been with the city now just about two years. And I met Chris Gordon uh maybe a year and a half, year and three quarters or so ago. And him and I destruct this great, not only friendship, but an awesome, awesome working relationship, which is even more important. Yard Stop's been instrumental in helping me put trees all around the community. But mostly and most lately, we've been really kind of reforesting downtown Maldora, which has been awesome sauce. And I say that because it has been, we put a nice variety of different trees. And if it wasn't for Yard Stop, I don't know how I could have got it done. So I'm grateful that they've done a great job with me. Chris has done an awesome job working with me. We've done it hand in hand, and uh I do appreciate yard stop and what they've done for the city.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Oh, that's awesome. I haven't worked for yard stop for too long on the marketing side, but I usually will go out and take pictures and videos of the jobs and coming out to I think it was, was it?

SPEAKER_01 1:31

It was Florida on the day. Yeah, uh which was in January for you guys. Yard stop installed a large tree, a seven-inch caliper tree, roughly seven-inch caliper tree. Uh, about 7,500 pounds.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

It was really big.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Big tree.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

The whole process looked a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

I mean, it was big tree. Yeah. Uh and big hole. So we were able to put that in. It was the largest tree ever put in the community of Mount Dora, uh, from our perspective, at least from the city's perspective. Uh, and we had extra water input on it, which Arch Stop helped provide as well. When I say watering mean irrigation system put around it. Uh, and we uh are excited about that tree because now, and that's a live oak, uh, that is a live oak, it's actually a cathedral live oak, but that particular tree is gonna help not only beautify the city's park, which is Donnelly Park, our main park, but allow another big tree so we can decorate it for Christmas. And that's one of our focuses that we're gonna be looking at over the next couple of years.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah, that is a huge attraction. Come Christmas time. I know they close off the main um entrance of the street and they let they do the light up Mount Dora and moths of people come. I've come to that several times. Absolutely. It's really beautiful, but we couldn't do it if we didn't plant big trees, you know? Absolutely, absolutely. Um so is there a difference between urban forester and tree arborist?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

How do they coincide if you're actually that's a great question because there really is a difference. Uh, you can be an urban forester and not an arborist. You can be an arborist and not an urban forester. And I'm both. Yeah. Um the the difference would be an arborist uh sits on an exam, they go through a process to learn. You have to get enough credits and information to be able to sit for the exam. And it's the state, it's a actually ISA, International Society of Amoriculture, yeah, is the organization that puts on the certified arborist um process. And there's different levels. You can go all the way top to be a board certified arborist. I am not, I'm I'm an uh just an independent arborist. Yeah. Um, and once you sit on that process of getting testing, uh, then you uh have to go through several quite a quite an intensive testing process. But once you pass that, you become a certified arborist, and then keeping that certified arborist process is going getting what's called CEUs, which is the continuing education credits or units. Um, and then once you continue keeping that up, it keeps your certification up.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Now, as an urban forester, uh, you can be an urban forester, which you can go get a degree from the University of Florida or anywhere. I'm picking on that one, but anywhere in this in the United States and get a degree uh in forestry, and then you can actually become an urban forester by working for an agency that would deem you as an urban forester. There are certifications also to be a certified urban forester. Uh I am working on that. I hope to get that sometime soon. But um the criteria of being an urban forester is actually usually working for somebody who calls you that, and an urban forester takes care of our trees within an urban setting.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Which is different from a forester who takes care of trees in a forest setting.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Okay. All right. And then do you work hand in hand with Mount Dora Friends of the Environment?

SPEAKER_01 4:45

I do. Um if it wasn't for that group uh like Mark Vaughn and the Mount Dor Friends of the Environment and that group, I probably wouldn't even be sitting here. Um they were instrumental as well to promote the idea of urban forestry to the community. After 30 years of promoting it, working with the city and doing urban forestry kind of on their own, uh, they pushed the city and pushed the city into getting an established urban forester and getting an urban forestry department. And that's been key to the success of myself and Mount Dora, Urban Forestry, and thanks to the Mount Dora friends who said, Hey, let's get this going, let's let's push this forward. Yeah, and two years ago we were able to implement that process, and I'm excited to be the first one.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

That's exciting. Um, do you do soil assessment as well?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

No, I don't do any soil assessments. Um, I well, in a sense, I guess you can call it soil assessment versus soil analysis. A soil analysis is taking it to a lab and you get all the goodies that's inside. Right. A soil assessment is really the only thing I would do, which deals with compaction or if an area is suitable to plant a tree. That's basically soil assessment. Okay. Um now there are other things I do. Obviously, I do more than just plant trees with the Mountdoor Friends Department. Tell us what more you do. Yeah, I I I don't even know where to start. There's so many other things. I also work on, I've developed a five in 25 year program. It's on our website. Um I helped put together the I didn't actually do the website, that was other people within the city, but we have a wonderful urban forestry website. On it uh has a lot of data and information that you can get additional things about urban forestry and what the city's doing. Uh, we're also doing a neighborhood tree program, which we're planting trees in our community through other resources. We're also doing a street tree program. We're also online, we've got a um what we call a canopy tree program that is actually partnership with the National Arbor Day Foundation, and that canopy program allows the general public, if you live in Mount Dora, you can get a free tree mailed to you. All you have to do is fill out a simple application. Yeah, a lot of people don't even know it. Um it's I had one mailed just to see how good it was. Great trees, fantastic tree, a nice size tree. It's not a little stick or something you you think you're gonna get. I mean, it's a it's a two and a half, three-foot tree mailed to you. You have a choice of several to choose from. Just go to the website, fill it out, piece of cake. Uh, but that's with the National Arbor Day Foundation.

unknown 7:23

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Um so we have multiple programs, and of course, the one that we're really excited about, we're doing our first ever um National Arbor Day um event that's gonna be this weekend, this Thursday, this Thursday, this Friday is actually Arbor Day on National Arbor Day the 24th, but on the 25th, we're gonna celebrate National Arbor Day, Arbor Day, and you guys are gonna be there too. Uh Yard Shop's gonna be there. Oh you guys are gonna be there side of the table, and you're gonna be setting up as well, but we're gonna be giving away trees to our community. Uh over 250 different species, uh different trees, not different species, 18 different species of trees. Yeah. Uh uh over 250 trees. Um, and what's great about that, we're also celebrating our nation's age or anniversary by um 250. We're gonna be 250 years old this year, so um, in turn, uh for our nation. And so we're gonna give away 250 plus trees. We're gonna be closer to 500 trees, really. Wow. Yeah, that's gonna be awesome. And if it wasn't for a guy that started in what was that date? Uh 1872, I believe. Um, he started about 150 years ago. We started National Arbor Day, Jay Sterling Morton, uh the founder of it, and they planted nearly a million trees in the first planting of Arbor Day. Awesome characters. So and there's two Arbor Days, Florida Arbor Day and National Arbor Day. Florida Arbor Day is recognized in January.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

And then National Arbor Day is recognized in April. Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

I feel like Johnny Appleseed should be in there somewhere, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Yeah, I like Johnny Appleseed too. He was a real character. People don't think he was real, he was really planted. Yeah, he planted apple trees throughout um actually out the west.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, why would you say that, other than people's love for trees, why should the community care about planting trees? And what if you could explain it from um a scientific point of view, what about the tree helps the environment to be clean? And can you explain a little bit more on that?

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah, that's um a loaded question. Yeah, that's a really loaded question because the information could be uh exponentially large. Um but the simplest probably answer is we love trees.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

We love trees. We love trees before its beauty, for its bloom, its ability, well, legacy of trees. Trees can live hundreds of years old, sometimes forty or fifty years old. Um we can plant them to reduce the heat in our house and reduce our temperature in our house by sometimes 10 to 15 percent, reduce our electric bill. It helps with erosion control. Um, it also helps with um the idea of habitats for animals and creatures.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Um it allows for softening of our environment. Uh the heat index that lures lowers lures uh lowers, excuse me, lowers the heat index of parking lots and uh areas around our community. Um it produces a canopy that softens our our our world around us. And yes, the people's waiting for me to say it, it does produce oxygen. It's not the greatest of production of oxygen. Uh that actually comes from photo um uh photoplantoplankton that's actually in the ocean, that's actually the greatest production of oxygen. But trees do produce oxygen, yeah, they take in carbon dioxide and they push out oxygen.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Wow. I think I asked Mark Vaughn this question too, but did you climb trees when you were a kid?

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Absolutely. You know, it's how can you not climb trees? And you know, that's another thing that trees are are not sitting in front of a video game. The great way to try to look at it is there's no memory or legacy or information in playing video games. It's come and goes and you go on. Yep, nobody cares. Yeah, but there's a memory, you build memories and and visions and ideas when you're climbing a tree, you're outside, you're playing, you get bit by a bug, you get rolling in the dirt, and you get stains on your knees, you fall out of a tree and break your arm. I'm being silly for a minute. Yeah, but that's a memory that you can always say that was cool. Building a forest, uh building a tree, tree forest, um, uh house or tree house uh within trees.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Cool memories.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

As an urban forester, would you say there's a concern with how many trees we have to cut down for all the new housing developments that we're building?

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yeah, that's a tough one. Everybody likes to throw that one into oh, they're just wiping out a trees. We joke about it, just take all the trees out, you know. You know, to some degree I get that. Um, everybody's concerned about too much production or too much development or too much, too much, too much. And the reality is we do it because of the world we live in. People are growing, we have to have people someplace to live. 1100 people move to our community every day or in our state. Uh, it used to be a thousand, it's gone up to eleven hundred. Moved in that is not hearsay, that is documented information. So, where are you gonna house all those people? You can say, well, kick them out and make them go back. People love Florida, they love Florida, so you gotta have a place to live.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Um, and that is a challenge. Now, how do you soften that challenge? You soften that by having great regulations. And yes, it's a it's a government thing. I do sit on our our board for our city, uh, that we also I sit on a landscape board and our tree board and something, anything related to that and code enforcement and well not code enforcement as much, even though I'd work with them, but um other areas of development for our city. And what we do with that is we encourage to replant our community, to put trees back in our community, to replant based on a certain criteria or status or cry or set up with a program. And if you can't put those trees back, you mitigate. And the way you do that is you have if you can only put so many inches back or so many trees back, then there's a cost.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

And that that cost then can develop into money that goes back into back into our city, such as a tree bank. And a tree bank is developed, which we have done since I've been here. We build this tree bank up, and what do we do with that money? We turn around and put more trees in our community. We use it to help fund certain things like the neighborhood tree program. We fund the street tree program, we do the National Arbor Day program that we fund. We even help with getting different organizations like Yard Stop to help us plant trees in our community, and we can take that funding to support it and not taxpayers' funds. So it ends up being a real win in the long run. Now, people might say, well, that money's gonna run out. Really, folks? We're always doing development. We're always doing development.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

More money, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

So that's the process of development. It's not an it's not an easy one to cure, but the idea is it's not curing, it's understanding what we have to do to put back trees. And there are trees that are undesirable. There really are. There's hazardous trees, there's nauseous trees, there's invasive trees, there's trees that just aren't good to keep. So in turn, what we do is we do a tree inventory, which we just did as well, through a grant, again, not city funds, uh, that we just did a tree inventory. We have 6,050 trees in our inventory of our city trees. We have over 3,400 in our right-of-way trees. Wow. And those numbers mean that we now can utilize that data, put it in a database called ARC or GSI. We can now start establishing where else we can put trees. Right. And if those trees, some of those trees are not desirable trees, we may need to remove those, such as some of the lower lobes, or trees under power lines, or trees that are failing, or china berry trees, or camphor trees, or trees that are collapsing, and that you don't sell here at yardstop because they're considered poor trees.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

So we're ideal of how can we make our community better by putting in better trees.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Right. And you had also mentioned something, you'd mentioned a lot of programs earlier. Um I wanted to ask, are those do do we need volunteers for those programs to work? And if so, um, how would you encourage the community to get involved with that?

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Great question again. Um we I have two part-time staff, so it's a very small group. It's myself, full-time, and two part-time guys. Uh and they have only been here just over a year and they're doing other things in my process. They're doing pruning trees. Um, we're also doing educational programs and pruning trees. But back to the volunteer thing, uh, our main source of volunteers is the Mountdoor friends of the environment. Okay. Um, they are again, I use that word again, I'm gonna repeat it, instrumental. They are exceptional on what they do for the city. The way that works is we have a meeting once a month uh with the uh small group of the um outdoor friends of the environment. We sit down, we discuss on where we'd like to plant more trees in our community. We talk about other things that we're doing as well, and then we decide on where we want to plant those trees, and then we put those, we get an idea, we do locates, we get an idea where we can put those trees, we try to group them, and then once we get the trees installed, the city installs the trees. Um, I now are contracting that workout. I used to do that all in-house, that was challenging, but now it's contracted out, which makes it so much simpler, so much quicker. So we put those once we get those in the ground. Then, if it wasn't for Mountdoor Friends in the Environment, because remember, these trees are in the ground, they who's watering them? Who's taking care of them? Well, here's the way that works. The Mountdoor Friends of the Environment agrees that they can water so many trees in a period of time. We set up, we've set up a program now. After two years, we've got a pretty good program, pretty good way to set it up. We do X amount of trees that we plant per season, and we water those trees per season. Once those are established based on the University of Florida guidelines, we get those established, we let those trees go, and we move on to the next planting, and then we start watering those trees. And we do this rotation of constantly putting trees in and letting trees go once they're established. And then my guys go back, we fertilize them, we also look at pruning, and we look at um doing things to those trees to keep them going and growing. Like that, going and growing.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah, I like that. That's catchy.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

That was catchy.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Going and growing.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

So that's kind of our process of and and so you can always to be a volunteer, I recommend going with the Mount Door friends in the environment. I don't have anything separate from them, and if I did, it would be really kind of um a challenge with both groups trying to do things that is not necessary. So the Mount Door Friends is our stopping point.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Or going point.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

I love that. Well, Mark, I feel like we covered a lot. There's probably so much more that I could sit here and ask you about, and we could we could probably go for another 20 minutes, um, but I know we're out of time. So is there anything else that you would like the community or anything else you would like our listeners to know before we before we end?

SPEAKER_01 18:38

I think the biggest thing I want to remind everybody that we are we're in it to win it. Uh we are here to serve our community one tree at a time. And by doing that, we can improve our canopy. We're at 34% right now, our canopy. My goal is to increase that. You might say, is that good or bad? Actually, that's very good. When the average in the whole state of Florida is only 36%. So we're very good at our canopy criteria, our canopy coverage. Our objective is to continue that canopy coverage, is continue planting trees, but the right tree. We also look at making sure it's the right place that we can plant. We want to reforce our community, and we need you to help. Thanks a lot for bringing me.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

That's a good call to action. Guys, thanks so much for tuning into this episode. Um, if you would like to get involved in the community with trees, you can go visit the Mount Door Friends of the Environment online. Thank you so much again for um joining our conversation. I hope you took something educational away. And yeah, go plant trees. We'll see you in the next episode. Also, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We really enjoyed having you.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Thank you, Emily.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

So we'll see you guys later.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

May the forest be with you. May the forest be with you.