Can You Prevent Sweet Gum Balls from Falling?

Liquidambar styraciflua, also known as the sweet gum tree, is great for providing beauty and shade on any property. They are also known for their spiky ball shaped fruit that drops from December to April. If you love your sweet gum trees but hate the mess they make when their fruit is falling, you may wonder if there is a way to prevent them from even producing sweet gum balls. After all, that would allow you to enjoy your trees without their annoying spiky fruit becoming a nuisance every year. There are methods you can use to accomplish this, but we should also explore the risks of such a feat.

Steve Pettis, an extension agent of agriculture with the North Carolina State University Cooperative, set out to answer this very question. There are two methods for using hormone-based chemicals to prevent a sweet gum tree from developing sweet gum balls. The first is by using a spray called ethephon sold by Florel Brand Fruit Eliminator. “The chemical ethepon (Florel) releases ethylene gas when it is sprayed onto the tree branches while sweetgum flowers are present in spring. Ethylene gas is a powerful plant hormone. If the tree is flowering when the chemical is applied, the gas will cause the flowers to drop off. Ethephon must be applied at just the right dosage, at just the right stage of flowering (full bloom) and at just the right temperature range; there is risk of plant damage if dosage or temperature are too high. Because the product must be sprayed on, complete coverage is easy on large, mature trees.”

The second method uses a different product called IBA or Indole butyric acid sold by Snipper. It can only be purchased by professionals and “must be injected into the tree while the flowers are still in bud stage in the spring. The micro-injection system used requires a skilled applicator. Timing and dosage are critical. The treatment must be done annually.”

As you can see, this process is a lot more complicated than purchasing a fruit eliminator from Amazon and spraying the trees yourself. Steve recommends hiring an arborist if you’re going to take on this kind of work. That way you’re not wasting time and money on something that requires a lot of research and planning to be effective. “Personally, I recommend people learn to live with sweet gum fruit or remove the trees. One way to mitigate the annoyance of the fruit dropping is to mulch sweet gum trees to the drip line. This way most of the fruit falls into the bed under the tree and becomes mulch.”

While it is possible to use chemicals to prevent sweet gum balls from developing, an important question to ask is if this is something we should be doing? Nature is a beautiful thing, and when we start interfering with the way things were created, we don’t usually get the best results. Letting the sweet gum balls fall and turn into mulch is a lot better way to solve this problem. If you don’t want to go with that method and you just want to clean up the area beneath your trees, Bag-A-Nut has great options for collecting sweet gum balls. These options are also a lot better for the environment.

Further Reading:

Plant Health Alert – Preventing Sweet Gum Tree Fruit | N.C. Cooperative Extension

Liquidambar styraciflua (American Sweet Gum, Redgum, Red Sweet Gum, Sweetgum, Sweet Gum, Sweetgum Tree) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox