Air Spade Services in Austin
Air spade services in Austin fall into two buckets — tree care and construction — and the tool is the same in both. An air spade is a compressed-air excavator, and the reason to use one is narrow and specific: it moves soil without cutting roots, pipes or wires in the ground. Six jobs come out of that, and they are the whole of what we sell on this page.
An air spade is a tool, not a treatment
Keith’s one-sentence version of why it matters:
The significance of the air spade is that it moves the soil without cutting roots or other pipes or wires in the ground.
That is the entire mechanism. Everything below is a job that becomes possible once you can excavate around a tree without a shovel, a trencher or a backhoe cutting through what is down there.
The version we argue against is root-zone work sold without a diagnosis — a “deep root” treatment offered as the answer to a decline nobody has actually looked at. Air spading is excavation. It is not a health service, and it is not a cure. If somebody proposes it on your tree, the useful question is: which of these jobs are you doing, and what did you see that made you recommend it?
It also helps to hold the right model of what any treatment does. Trees, in Keith’s words, are living things fighting their own fight with mother nature against the things that ail them. Taking a stressor off a tree is subtraction — one of the thousand cuts removed — not a switch that decides the outcome.
Bucket one — tree care
1. Root flare excavation
The job is to restore proper grade at the base of the tree. The flare is where the trunk widens out into roots; either you can see it, or soil is sitting against the trunk instead.
Where the problem comes from:
This is solving a problem that often comes with either developed sites where the native trees have had erosion or fill soil placed against the base of the trees… Also on young newly planted trees. They’ll often get planted too deep.
There is another origin, and it is worth knowing before you buy a tree at all:
A lot of times, coming straight out of the nursery, just the repotting process will have buried the root flares a little bit. So we’re often even just having to correct problems that the tree farms have created.
Why it is worth digging for. A buried root flare is one of the things a declining live oak turns out to be when it isn’t oak wilt — alongside weed-and-feed damage, abrupt irrigation changes and compounding spring stress. That list is on the oak wilt page, and a buried flare is the item on it you can fix with a machine. On young trees the consequence is more direct: bury the flares on a Monterrey oak or a young red oak and they are, in his words, really susceptible to boring insects.
Root pruning, which rides along
Once the base is open, deflected and girdling roots are visible and reachable:
Any deflected or girdling roots, we would also prune while providing the root flare excavations.
That is part of the excavation rather than a second visit. And afterwards, keep mulch and compost off the trunk — around the base of the tree, but away from the root flares. The whole point of the excavation is that the flare stays open to the air.
2. Soil amending — decompaction and compost
Here we air spade the top several inches of soil, with two objectives, often trying to meet both.
Decompaction, where construction activity, foot traffic or erosion has closed the soil up:
We will literally be tilling the soil with air so that we could break up the soil without damaging the tree roots.
Compost incorporation, and the analogy is his:
The analogy there is repotting your plants. We’re literally trying to improve the quality of soil within the tree’s root zone.
Whether compost goes on top or gets mixed in — and which half is yours
This is the decision that settles whether you need us at all, and the rule is simple:
Many times as normal tree care practices, we’ll recommend just spreading a layer of compost across the surface of the ground. That’s most often when there’s turf and access to the soil is not obvious or easy. If there’s not turf and it’s just bare ground, then we’ll often want to loosen the soil and mix the compost in with the top layer of soil.
| What is on the ground | The method |
|---|---|
| Turf | Surface application — out to the drip line, roughly the extent of the branches, half an inch to an inch thick, around the base but away from the flares |
| Bare ground | Air spade, and mix the compost into the top layer |
| Aggregate or decomposed granite | The problem case — we have to look for alternative options |
Spreading compost over turf is a job you can do yourself. Working it into bare ground is not: that is the air spade, and it is one of the things a professional brings that a homeowner cannot rent their way to.
Compost and mulch and the tree care program are separate services, often offered together.
2b. Vertical mulching
Vertical mulching is the sixth job, and it belongs on the tree care side with the work above.
Bucket two — construction, and why Austin is the outlier
Same tool, different buyer. Construction site services is the page for the whole sequence around a build; this is the air spade’s part in it.
3. Utility trenching inside a protected root zone
If a contractor needs to install a utility within a protected root zone, the city will allow us to air spade that trench so that significant roots can be left behind.
Read the jurisdiction carefully, because this one is local. Keith:
The City of Austin — that is a known technique that allows trenching within a tree’s protective root zone while still meeting ordinance compliance specifications… Austin is an outlier in that it is a known process.
His read on the rest of the region: ordinance review and compliance practice vary from one jurisdiction to the next, some specifically allow it, and it remains good arboriculture whether or not a code names it. Check your address against the jurisdiction finder, and if a project’s compliance path depends on this, have that conversation before the trench is dug.
4. Pier holes for foundations, fences and decks
Same premise — get the hole in without damaging significant tree roots. The part worth knowing at design stage is what happens when we hit something:
If we run into a root, we’re able to relocate the pier a small amount, typically not a problem for the engineers drawing the plans.
5. Soil amending again, as damage mitigation
Two different things get called mitigation on a build site and they are not interchangeable.
| Removal mitigation | Damage mitigation | |
|---|---|---|
| What triggers it | Mitigating the removal of a protected size tree | A tree inadvertently damaged during construction — a protection measure breached, plus damage to roots inside that breach |
| What the City wants | Replacement trees planted on site | A remedy tied to the type of damage that happened |
| What we deliver | A recommendation of what types of trees to plant and where — that is consulting work | The remedial service itself |
The right-hand column is where the air spade lives, and the matching rule is the whole mechanism:
| The damage | The remedy the City will typically accept |
|---|---|
| “They trenched and cut a few roots” | Fertilization to help provide nutrients to the tree to regrow roots, maybe compost as well |
| “A skid steer driving over a protected root zone” | Air spading to amend the soil in the root zone where the machine compacted and damaged the soil |
Be clear about what that is and isn’t: we perform the remedy the City accepts. We do not make a breach go away.
One fleet detail that changes a construction schedule rather than a tree: one of our swappable truck bodies carries the spray rig and the air compressor together, “so that one truck can do the air spading and provide the deep root fertilization.” Two services, one visit, on a site where the next trade is waiting.
What makes one of these jobs big or small
No rates here — you get a quote for your tree. What moves the number is worth knowing, and on a root flare excavation Keith is specific:
It will be different for every job… if the root flares are only marginally buried, it may be a very small amount of work. If there’s a lot of fill or erosion in the area, maybe it’s a larger job.
The same logic runs through the rest of the list: how much soil has to move, how much of it is fill, and how much of the root zone is involved.
Get a free estimate
An arborist comes out, looks at the tree and looks at the ground around it — where the grade sits against the trunk, what has been driven or walked across the root zone, and which of the six jobs above your tree actually needs.
Call (512) 996-9100 or request an estimate online.
Air spading is on-site work, so this is a Central Texas service — Austin and the surrounding metro. The cities we cover are listed on tree service by city.
Related: Tree Care · Mulching & Composting · Construction Site Services · Arborist Consulting · Tree Planting · Oak Wilt