Air Spade Services

What is a Air Spade

The Air Spade service is a selective excavator. Selective in the sense that it fractures, pulverizes and displaces porous and semi-porous soils, yet leaves nonporous objects unaffected. The Air Spade excavates soil without risk of damaging buried utilities.

The Air Spade employs converging/diverging nozzle technology to accelerate compressed air to supersonic speed (to 1500 mph). The high velocity air stream travels approximately 4 inches from the distal end of the Air Spade - "the cutting edge" - before decompressing to atmospheric pressure with sufficient violence to pulverize and displace soil. In simple terms the Air Spade dislodges soil without damaging tree roots, underground services, quickly and easily. Below you will see the services we offer using this great piece of tree health care equipment.

Vertical Mulching

Trees in there natural setting i.e. forests and woodlands, naturally fertilize themselves through annual leaf drop, decaying branches, twigs and various other natural occurrences. All this organic matter is broken down and taken deep into the root system by all manner of micro organisms, insects, earth worms and fungi, at the same time this process aerates the soil, creating a free draining, and healthy tree environment.

Compacted soils within the urban tree root zone are by far the biggest cause of tree related diseases. Trees require three basic elements to survive, food/nutrients, oxygen, and water. Compacted soils especially heavy clays severely restrict all three elements, the lack of these elements will cause a tree to become stressed. If a tree is stressed it is only a matter of time before it succumbs to some form of disease.

We at Arbor Aeration carry out a service known as vertical mulching, basically we use the “Air Spade” to create a pattern of holes within the trees root zone, the holes are around 14” deep and 3” wide, most importantly the Air Spade removes the soil and creates the hole without causing any damage to the trees roots!.  We then backfill the holes with a blend of organic matter such as composted wood chip, pea shingle etc. We are basically mimicking the trees favoured growing conditions the best we can in and urban environment. We have seen some fantastic results on declining trees using this process.

OTHER AIR SPADE SERVICES 

Our Air Spade has been used on various projects including the installation of cables, pipes and services around tree roots, construction site soil de-compaction, soil removal, radial trenching, root pruning, root disease investigation.

Whenever you need to carefully excavate around tree roots, you need to call Arbor Aeration!