Water sprouts = bad pruning?
Last year I paid over $1000 to one of the big name arborist companies in my area to prune and cable a 40 year old 3-stem silver maple in my yard. Each of the 3 main stems is about 18” dbh. Personally I manage about 100 acres of woodlands so I know a bit about trees but I’m definitely not a climbing arborist.
Advice needed: Most of the pruning sites are producing numerous water spouts instead of healing over properly. Seems like maybe the pruning cuts weren’t done in the proper collar region?
The tree could be stressed anyway- it’s on the property line and my neighbor hires lawn care places that do “weed treatments” in the turfgrass on one side of the tree. Plus there’s a dryad’s saddle mushroom that fruits from a very old pruning cavity in one of the stems. But overall a healthy-appearing mature silver maple with a decade or so left before the mushroom rots the structural heartwood.
Do the water spouts mean that I should ask the original arborist company to come back and “correct” the original pruning cuts? Or is this just normal residential tree behavior?