I knew it was bad to add fertlilizer and compost but the nursery recommended the fiber stuff so i thought it was OK. live and learn, i guess. i’ll dig carefully around it to see how hard it is to move without damaging it and then try to replace the fiber stuff with natural soil. I wasn’t expecting to get fruit for a couple years anyway.
I wish I could go back in time and replant several trees far higher above grade. As I mulch very deeply annually (at least) the grade has been very hard to keep from burying a few of my citrus and one of my stone fruit trees. I think moving any tree in ground more than one year is ill-advised and likely just something to not do in the future. Of my 70 or so in ground I have 4 kumquats and 1 peach planted too deep, almost everything else is perfect, if they eventually succumb to my novice first year planting that will be a mistake I can learn from. It does not seem to be harming the peach at all, however the kumquats seem stunted from that. The problem is I moved one of the kumquats and didn’t plant it well above grade in the move. I moved 4 feijoas and it really stunted them, all of them are still really small with this year being the first year they look like they will burst with growth. My mom planted one feijoa at the same time I initially planted mine and hers is 4x the size of mine that were moved. I bought all 5 at the same time and all the same size. My point being you will lose a couple years of growth from a move. I’d say just keep mulch and soil off the trunk as best you can.
Funny enough I don’t subscribe to the usual planting methods. I like to plant deep. I do it on my citrus and am trying it on mangoes. On the citrus it has proved to protect the graft. During weeding I’ve found my citrus do a good job of putting out new roots above the graft. I’m pretty much of the subscription of if it’s possible to root a plant it’ll be fine buried deep so long as you don’t over water.
Here’s an interesting read for you I found recently.
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I don’t think there is much concrete research on whether to amend or not, trees use roots for number of purposes including nutrition, once the nutrients are exhausted in the hole they will just grow the roots else where until they hit hardpan like impenetrable soil. However, planting them on mounds is way to go simple because it gives additional volume for roots to fill resulting in healthy tree with larger harvest.
I have experimented with this approach, I had pots with open bottoms on clay soil, the roots left the potting media and grew into the clay soil 3-4" in just one short season. In other case, I planted on a mound made up of potting soil in early summer, these trees too put their roots into the clay and grew fibrous roots in the mound.
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Cincinnati is the clay capital of the USA.
I just replanted. I originally planted it 9 months ago (almost to the day) so hopefully it won’t be a problem. I havent’ seen any growth in height since i planted originally so i figured it was worth a shot. I dug around it carefully disturbing as few roots as possible and lifted it then backfilled with nearby soil from the yard. I heard a few small roots break when i lifted it but hopefully not many. There were roots all around still attached and going into the soil when i backfilled. Now the top of the root flare is a tiny bit above ground on a very slight mound.
I hope this works. I’m wondering how much time i delayed the growth from replanting.
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I have no problem believing that!
I don’t know about any research but I have seen people who posted here lose trees from amending holes. The roots just went around and around and girdled themselves. They didn’t make it.
Now one guy with really bad soil like brick clay. He amended four feet around the tree and that seemed to work. The roots were led far enough out it would take some time to girdle. One guy saved his trees because he had to move them. All the trees girdled but he broke them up and replanted elsewhere. Why one should untangle when up potting. I hate such issues I went to root pouches and that stopped roots from circling. All trees in pots are in fabric for me. It’s been working well.
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Welcome to the forum, Frank!
In the future, if your trees seem happy, I’d lean towards less is more as sometimes when I see folks stressing over stuff like this they end up “killing the plant with kindness”, in a literal sense. Stone fruit are generally a challenging fruit to grow in the northeast as we have more disease challenges than somewhere like California. Good luck with your new tree!
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that is interesting, so its like the roots chased the nutrients in the hole and got entangled? or there is more to the story besides I amended the hole and it killed my tree. I’ll try to search the thread.
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I don’t remember where I read all the examples? To answer your question, yes they chased the nutrients.
Read this thread. A few others around
thanks, I am having difficult time to take this example at its face value. For the sake of politeness, I can share my thoughts over the DM.
I personally amend every plant I plant. My soil isn’t sandy, it’s sand; completely devoid of organic matter. One day perhaps everything will die but I can’t imagine roots wouldn’t venture outside of the amended hole. At least not in my case as the soil isn’t compacted. I’m attempting to build soil with “back to Eden” approach, but organic materials just get drank up. I don’t think it’s possible to say any one thing works or doesn’t work universally; however I think it can’t be possible to claim amending a hole is going to hurt a plant long term. The plant (other than bare root trees) comes in a pot of amended soil, so why would making that area marginally larger be any different. If plants routinely died after finding the amendments then most plants would die after the soil they came with was exhausted.
I will continue to amend my planting locations, as I feel it is necessary for me. If I had deep fertile soil I wouldn’t find it to be necessary.
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What’s the big deal about transplanting bearing age trees? Sure, it often sets them back for a year, but that seems so much better than setting up a tree for a lifetime struggle for survival.
My business involves moving 2.5" caliber 10’ and taller, well branched trees from my nursery to their permanent sites on a regular basis. Admittedly, my loamy soil is much easier to work in than a heavy clay, but with a sturdy cultivating fork and shovel it’s not a big deal to dig up a single tree bare root while in dormancy- spring or fall. Just retrieve as much root as possible and if you have an excessively heavy soil, bring in a yard or two of decent, lighter top-soil and create a mound to plant it in, if that’s what’s necessary. If you are industrious enough, you can use half of that imported soil to mix with the heavy stuff as the base of your mound. Soil texture needs to run form coarser to finer going down to achieve good drainage.
Peaches and nectarines require good drainage to thrive and if they don’t have that it’s probably best to cut a deep planted down than try to make it productive… if you aren’t willing to transplant it to a different site or onto a mound. .
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These are citrus, imo not a great time of year to move them. I don’t like to disturb them in late winter after harvest, and in early spring they are putting on new growth and flowers. As others have mentioned they are likely to root along the mulched trunk, they don’t seem to be bothered by their slightly deep planting. The one peach is on year 4 or 5 without any issues, I just have to pull back the mulch from the trunk. As deeply as I mulch for sure I would have ran into doing this anyhow, since the peach was the first planting; therefore the grade is now much higher than I began with.
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I misunderstood your situation. It doesn’t appear you have a problem to begin with. I’ve often dealt with trees planted in poor drainage situations and I thought that was what we were talking about. I’m not sure what help you needed in the first place- maybe just to know citrus are capable of rooting above their grafts, which most of the varieties-species I grow cannot reliably do. I haven’t grown citrus since I left CA 45 years ago and only grew one Washington navel, on a dwarfing rootstock, even then. I was at the base of a coastal canyon where citrus was challenged by winter frosts.
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I wasn’t asking for help, simply using my mistakes as an example for “it’s not the end of the world if you plant too deep”. For sure if drainage was an issue it would be a different situation in which losing a year or two of growth or fruit would certainly be worth transplanting higher above grade. I didn’t understand that was the issue they were having, however if that is indeed the case, I definitely defer to your judgement.
Here we can get a 5” downpour and have no water standing within minutes, so drainage is one issue I won’t be contending with. That said planting high is always the way to go imo, unless you’re planting something like tomatoes and you just want a more vigorous root system. However even then I’ve seen people experiment with same size plants planted high and deep and the end result seemed very similar so who knows if that helps long term with tomatoes. I tend to do it out of habit in hopes that it will help them with windy days.
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I know the feeling in other areas I was always wary of some advice. I live in an area where the top soil is better than any top soil you could buy. We don’t need amendments, the trees grow very well in native clay loam. I dig holes to harvest our top soil, and fill it with bagged top soil as the native soil is so much better. I like to mound trees, so need more soil. I have seen girdling in pots, and have observed the bathtub effect with my own eyes. Change the grade of soil and the water will stop.
So I tend to think the guy nailed what happened, but you have to go by your own gut.
I love Farmer Fred’s rules of gardening. One is “Everything you know is wrong”.
As far as the bathtub effect, I go back to an old Star Trek quote “You can’t change the laws of physics”. This is reason enough, whether roots girdle or not.
Purdue University
Cooperative Extension Service
https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/BP/BP-31.html
Improper planting . One of the most common causes of plant root failure is “wet feet” caused by improper soil amendments–the “bathtub effect.”
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I’ve moved a lot of trees in the last couple of years for various reasons. I planted around 8 or so bare root plum and apple trees in an area near the beach where the soil was very sandy. All were planted with the root crown at ground level. I did add some, but not very much amendments. These trees all did very poorly, after several seasons I relocated all of them. I have also moved a pear tree over 15 years old twice in the last 4 years.
All of these experiences have taught me that on my property I need to put down a root barrier to stop other roots from choking small trees while getting established. I then build a mound at least a foot to a foot and a half high of quality soil. The trees I planted in mounds are doing much better than the trees I originally planted at ground level. Mound higher than you think you need, because the tree can settle quite a bit over the years.
Don’t be afraid to move trees IMO, as long as the tree is dormant it should be fine.
Then consider my responses addressed to Frank whose query I was answering in the first place based on the title of the topic. I get confused when threads get pretty long.
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