I confess. Other than around the house I have never planted a tree for habitat improvement. Its looks too hard! By that I mean the effort and investment required to assure some level of success at some uncertain time down the road leaves me shaking my head left and right, not up and down. Now, I do have plenty of trees to manage. Those are the ones God put there and even he didn't do such a good job in places (God can laugh, too)!
Since we're just waiting for winter to end, let me ask - if you have planted trees how successful have you been? Did you get the results you expected? And what essential points about your successes or failures would you make to someone like me who's about to re-consider tree planting as a mis-adventure?
How are fruit trees different from pines/evergreens different from hardwoods? Tips and tricks please?
Dan,
I've made a lot of mistakes planting tees over the years. I think the type of tree and you soil influence how to plant. Years ago, I decided to experiment with some Jujube trees. I bought them bare root and dug deep wide holes in my heavy clay soil and amended them with a lot of peat, manure, and other organic material. I even made a slurry of watersorb and dunked the roots. I ran a soaker hose around the tree on top of the ground and tied the end to the fencing I used to protect them and covered the hose with wood chips. I filled my 55 gal sprayer with water and pumped water into those soaker hoses when it was dry. Eventually I bought some of those green bags you fill with water that oozes out a valve over time and put them around the trees.
These trees grew great for quite a few years. I did have a wind gust get gly on one. It didn't kill it, but it stunted it. The rest were doing very well. Then one year when they were 15' tall and had trunks as large as my forearm, one blew over in a wind storm. When I did my post mortem, I found several things. First, those deep wide holes backfilled with organic material provided the trees everything they needed so they never penetrated the native clay. Jujube are not sensitive to water. They can handle wet feet and do fine in drought. So basically, I was growing these trees in a pot created by the clay. Second, all that organic mulch was an attractive area for critters to next. Not sure if they were voles or what, but something had tunneled through the mulch and backfill to munch on the roots. Bottom line is that the tree was not anchored into the clay.
I stood the tree back up and used my FEL to dump loads of native clay on top of the mulch compressing it after removing the soaker hoses and such (I hadn't used them for years). I then staked the tree. I did the same, minus the staking, to the other jujubes that had been planted like that. The native clay compressed all the mulch and organic backfill hopefully providing more anchoring until the roots penetrate the clay.
Most of my trees since then have been planted from rootmakers. This is a miniature version of the same issue I created with the jujube because the medium used in RMs is very well drained. If you remove it before planting, you lose one of the big advantages of RMs, the root ball is fully intact and undisturbed at planting time which means you don't have the sleep/creep/leap effect we see on bare root trees. Chestnuts really don't like bare feet. There are several keys to planting them in our heavy clay. First, I select a site where ground water does not naturally drain into the hole. I use a tractor auger to very close to the diameter of the container and did a deep hole. I use a hand rake to make sure the auger did not glaze the clay on the sides of the hole. I then back fill the hole with quarry stone. I add a little native clay on top of that and then set in the root ball. I want the top of the medium about an inch above the ground level. I then use native clay to form a lip to further prevent ground water from running into the hole. I cover it with landscaping cloth (air and water permeable) and use quarry stone to mulch.
The theory here is that any ponding I'm creating in the clay is occurring in the quarry stone below the root ball. By the time summer dry time comes in our area, because the hole is so close in diameter to rootball, the lateral roots have penetrated the clay that holds moisture. The quarry stone below the root ball provides no real nutrition or anything for the long term. However, rootmaker trees don't have a tap root that extending down. Most of the nutrition and moisture is located in the top foot to two where the lateral roots extend. As the tree and root ball grows, outside that small diameter where the stone is, there is plenty of room for downward root growth.
I'm not sure if the quarry stone below the root ball is needed for other kinds of trees like apples or persimmons that don't have a wet feet issue. I've been doing this just to be on the cautious side, but it may not be needed for them.
One other lesson I learn, specific to root pruned trees, is that the larger the root ball, the better. I've tried using a dibble and rotating it which digs out enough for an 18. The rootball is so small with an 18 that survival rates are low and those trees that survive don't seem to thrive. When planting from 1 gal containers that have been filled by roots, success rates go up and many more trees thrive. For me, the best success has been planting from 3 gal RB2s.
The only other thing I'd add is that protection really depends on your conditions. Some trees I plant are completely ignored by deer. Others are hammered. Some years are worse than others. Trees planted in open fields with clover or other food get more deer attention than trees planted in the woods. It has taken me a while to figure out when I can get away with no protection, when I need tubes, and when I need cages.
Thanks,
Jack
