When should a hackberry be pruned?
Dormant season, and prune it young and prune it often, because hackberry's natural habit is a dense mass of fine twiggy lateral branching and that branch density is exactly what loads up with ice. The species-specific trap is witches' broom — dense contorted twig knots at the branch tips caused by an eriophyid mite plus powdery mildew — which homeowners want pruned out and which is not worth billing for, since it is harmless, it grows back, and the cuts just generate more twiggy growth.
Reading hackberry before you cut
Hackberry looks worse than it is for most of the summer, so separating cosmetic damage from real decline is the entire job here. Nipple galls (small raised bumps on the leaf undersides from a psyllid), witches' broom and leaf spotting are all disfiguring and all harmless — real decline is upper-crown dieback with progressively smaller leaves and thinning twigs, and the usual causes in this region are mower and string-trimmer wounds on thin young bark, or old storm breaks that opened a decay column.
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