A Few Gardening Factoids

Planting a tree?
We had a certified arborist teaching our class on Saturday and he said a few things that many people in class had a hard time swallowing. Lessons learned wrong are hard to give up!

Dig the hole wide, not deep. The hole should be a little shorter than the height of the pot or root ball. Don't dig it deeper because the dirt down below will settle and your tree will end up too low compared to the surrounding ground. The tree should be planted so that it is on a little mound, with the top of the dirt around the tree being slightly higher than the surrounding ground. Dig the hole about twice as wide as the root ball. Make sure to make a little berm at the edge of the rootball (not the edge of the hole you dug!) so that the initial watering stays right at the root ball. When first planted, the tree needs water to flow right down where its roots already are. If you water a larger area, the native soil and the nursery pot mix don't hold water the same way and the native soil can attract all the water, leaving the nursery potting mix (and the roots!) dry. After the first season, when roots have spread, the berm can be moved out or eliminated altogether.

Don't amend the soil. No fertilizer, no compost, no B12, nothing, nada, zilch. Use your native dirt that you just dug out of the hole. If it is really compacted clay, then chop it up and "uncompact" it with the shovel or your hands. Break up the clumps. Then put it back in the hole. Alone. With no soil amendments. (He answered about 5 questions about this from people who couldn't believe this was true in their case! To every question he said don't add anything to the soil!)

Don't stake it tight, and don't leave the stakes on past the first year. The stake is only to hold the tree up while its roots are newly in the ground and not yet anchored. Once the roots take hold, the tree will hold itself up. Windy? The tree will develop a shape and root structure that copes with the wind. It will also develop wood structure that compensates for the wind, with the internal concentric rings being closer together on one side and more spread out on the other.

There is research behind all of this advice. Some of it is actually about 20 year old research. The nursery industry evolves slowly! Or maybe they are like McDonald's. Would you like soil amendments with that? What about stakes? Some B12? Are you sure???

I had read the chapter before class so we almost did everything right when we planted our new cherry trees last week. The only thing that wasn't in my pre-reading was the part about the berm around the root ball not around the hole you dug. Probably not as important for bareroots since there is no nursery pot dirt.