Growing Trees

[rraisley]

Well, looks like in almost 8 years there's been no change on this. I've just run into the same problem and confusion. A have a 31' Shagbark Hickory tree in my yard, and Net info tells me it can grow to 70' or more, and averages less than 12" per year growth. So a mature tree is over 70 years old. And, let's say my current tree is 31 years old. I can't enter either of those values into the Plant Information, which limits age to 240 months (20 years).

So, I try to fudge, and say that it's current age is 106 months, with a mature age of 240 months, figuring it's a little less than half grown. But now it grows much too fast, of course. Well, actually, it seems pretty messed up:

With these settings: 840" height at maturity, 240 age at maturity, 106 starting age, 372" height, I get the following heights for years:

Starting - 372"
36 Months - 371"
60 months - 371"
96 months - 371"
120 months - 420"
180 months - 630"
240 months - 840"

Oh, and it never goes back to 372", even when set at 0 months.

After it gets growing, it averages 42" per year, which is roughly 4 times what it should be. But it doesn't grow at all for the first 106 months (almost 9 years!). Something's really messed up there.

As to Dan's comment about the 20 year arbitrary limit when houses can be there much longer, the main thing is that TREES can be much older. And without a reasonable life of tree, I don't see a way to get a reasonably accurate tree growth. BUt then I haven't even been able to get a /consistent/ growth, so I may have other problems.

So, I'd appreciate some suggestions as to how, if it is possible at all, to make trees grow at a reasonable rate, or even prevent them from growing at all, as even that would be preferred when trying to look at bush growth in the near term.