Advice on Silver Birch seeds please

Sorry, but no solution. We have a silver birch that is bigger than that (used to have two but the hurricane of '87 took the other one) and we just put up with it. The seeds do get everywhere but, unfortunately, that is the down side of having a very attractive tree that is a good habitat for wildlife - the woodpeckers love it.

They don't take well to pruning and, unlike a lot of other trees, should only be pruned around Sept/Oct otherwise they can exude a lot of very sticky sap.

We mow the seeds from the lawn and don't bother with those from the flower beds. In the 50 years we have been here we don't remember any of the seeds actually growing in the beds. Seeds elsewhere we just put up with. Although we do get some in the loft we don't get any in the house but we don't have windows open during the worst of the seed dropping times. I've never noticed the seeds as being a bother with the cars although we don't have the windows open and, I would guess, any that get under the bonnet disappear whilst driving.

We don't notice a problem with the gutters but the seeds probably get washed down when it rains - although, at this time of year, we need to clean the willow leaves out of the gutters. The seeds on the patio usually get blown onto the lawn or beds and if there are a lot of them on the patio when we need to use it a quick blast from the hose will push them onto the lawn (our patio is approx. 2,000sq ft but only takes 5-10 minutes to hose it off - which doesn't happen often).

The joys of having a large garden with large trees!

Having the tree removed would be the only real solution and that is very expensive.

 

I haven't really noticed anything worse this year but having been here so long I just may have got used to it. I don't think it normally goes into December. We do tend to get about a month of heavier seeding but if we get strong winds, which we get coming across the fields at the back, we have clouds of seeds coming down in just a few days.