I have a four year old green gage plum tree. It produced fruit for the first time this past fall. It is about twelve feet and has a trunk girth of two inches. I live in zone six. I need to relocate it. My question is will it live and when should i transplant it? Am i better off transplanting it now or early spring? Thanks for any advice.
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A four-year-old plum is pretty hard to dig up without a backhoe or similar tool. I have done it, it is doable, but be prepared for a lot of work and having to cut some big roots. The hardest part are the roots going straight down (the tap root), I often had to cut that one off and mainly preserve the side roots. As long as you get a good chunk of the roots it should live.
The best time for tree moving is now, it will give the tree more time to adapt to get used to the new soil. I hope to do some moving this coming weekend provided it is warm enough. Fortunately I am only moving 1-2 year old peach seedlings which are fairly trivial to move.
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How hard it will be depends a lot on the soil- how heavy and rocky it is, and the tools you have. A nice potato fork and a solid metal spade is invaluable. The problem is that it is an acquired skill even if it isn’t very complicated, so it will probably take you at least an hour to free the roots, even in lighter soil without too many rocks.
I move such trees by the score every fall, but most of them have a sheet of plastic a foot down to discourage some of the deep rooting. However I’ve moved many without the benefit of that and you can probably get almost all the roots on just a 2" caliber tree.
We get such trees out of the ground (mostly my helper these days) usually in 10-30 minutes each. But it’s what we do for a living and we have the right hand tools. Also my soil is fairly light- heavy clay concentrates the roots in a smaller area but still requires more work.
I do most of my transplanting in the fall and even now you could pull it off as long as you lay down 3-4" of mulch over the rootsystem after planting. However, you won’t lose much by waiting for spring.
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Scott
Merry Christmas to you and all the members of your website who share so freely of their knowledge and expertise and offer so many helpful hints to grafting practice!
Sincerely
Dennis
Kent, Wa
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Thanks for all the advice. Unfortunatly all i have is a pick and shovel. The soil that it currently in is soft and peethumos.
Use the shovel with your side to the tree (so the blade is more parallel than perpendicular to the roots) and you will cut fewer roots, but forking away soil from roots is almost essential. You can buy a nice Chinese potato hook for around $50 from AMLeo.com that will last you a long time if you don’t store it in the rain and rot the handle. IMO every gardener could benefit from owning and using one, not just for transplanting but for planting (pulling soil mixed with roots and rocks back into holes) and in the vegetable and ornamental gardens for preparing beds. You can also probably find something much cheaper, like a straight cultivating fork at a big box or hardware store that will be adequate. But freeing roots with just a pick and shovel sounds like pretty hard work to me. I’d hate to have to do it. We don’t even use a pick for this job. We do use a shovel, but carefully.
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