I recently put in four cherries, three are doing great but one is not. It looked fine when I bought it but the soil around the roots disintegrated when I took it out of the pot and the tree’s leaves immediately started turning brown. Only a few are still green. I’ve not planted trees before so I don’t know if I should wait it out and see if it recovers or just yank it and get another. It also needs to be pruned but if it’s a goner I’m not going to bother.
1 Like
Water the heck out of that tree, and you should be good. ‘Transplant shock’ is usually just under watering. Ideally, you should water the hole before you add the tree, then puddle in the tree several times during backfill. Water again after the hole is filled, then deep water every couple of days for the first few weeks. Once or twice a week after that for the remainder of the first growing season.
Right now, the rootball is probably quite dry. You’ll need to give it a good deep soaking or two to re-wet it, then you can get back on the schedule above.
2 Likes
The best thing to do when you loose a high amount of roots would be to prune it hard. The problem lies in that the root structure can not support all the branches. Now how much to take off would be how much of the roots you loose. Cut off all dead limbs. Prune back to the leaves that look healthy.
1 Like
Cherries do not like wet roots. It will kill them.
1 Like
Not long term, no. During establishment, they need constant moisture (which is different from wet). In most soils, the watering regimen I recommend will not result in overly wet soil. If it does, there’s not adequate drainage.
3 Likes
I would advise against heavy pruning in this case. It does not sound like roots were lost. Just that the planting hole dried out. Even if it had lost roots, this early in the growth cycle, the tree is not going to outgrow its roots. It would be a different story if it were fully leafed out.
I took the roots being disintegrated as losing roots when it was pulled out the pot to retransplant. That hapened to me before. Going back I think I misunderstood the orginal question.
Totally agree that plenty of water when establishing especially bare root trees. However, cherries are very particular when the roots stay wet.