Standard advice it to water in transplants, but if the soil is at the right point of moisture, I believe this does more harm than good or at least can do so and that the oft repeated guidelines are just to make sure that the soil is adequately moist when you are done. Basically, gardening for dummies.
I never water in my bare root fruit tree transplants in my nursery because I believe the roots do fine if you simply tamp down the soil enough to assure good soil contact with the roots- if you do this after watering in fine soils, you may end up excessively compacting the soil around the roots, especially if your soil leans to clay texture, but even in silts. So if you’d rather follow conventional advice, water after tamping down the soil. Anyway, dragging around a hose is time expensive.
If soil is dry, I think the best thing to do is to deeply water a day before transplanting or so. Moist soil is all a tree needs to get its roots growing.
My observations are anecdotal, but as far as I can find, so are the standard recs. I can find no research that compares results of watering in and not doing it when starting with optimally moist soil.
I use the same method when installing vegetable plants into the soil. I just make sure the potting soil they are growing in is completely soaked before putting them in soil.
I’m sure you have this figured out for your situation. I think you have good soils and generally reliable rainfall in spring. Other areas can have a much different situation. Where I’ve been gardening in the last 50 years it may not rain for months after planting. Not watering in and not watering regularly after planting would result in tree death or poor growth.
Watering in shouldn’t hurt as long as one avoids damaging the soil structure during or after planting. Don’t compact wet soil. Especially fine textured soil prone to compaction. And don’t water in with excessive force that turns the soil into a slurry.
I water in gently after planting. That settles the soil and inch or two. Over the next year the soil usually settles another inch or so. That would indicate that the soil wasn’t excessively compacted during planting.
I was not ta/king about post planting water management and specified that my topic relates to planting into soil with an optimum moisture level at the time. This is the case in many regions in spring, often even where I learned to garden in S. CA. I know nothing of conditions in Texas, but my statement stands everywhere, IMO. I have followed the same methods with herbaceous plants even during summer months. I don’t know that soaking the soil brings better access to water for the trees than by simply being in moist soil, but I believe that the roots grow better in moist soil than soaking wet soil. To be sure, it would have to be researched.
A skilled gardener like yourself would be unlikely to excessively compact the soil while planting, I wasn’t suggesting it was an issue with most experienced gardeners. My point is that the literature is based on a non-researched repetition whose validity I find questionable. These things occur all the time in literature of hort guidelines.
Almost all the literature recommends watering plants in and yet I cannot find a single study that has tested this against simply firming plants into already moist soil. If I’m right, imagine how much water is being wasted all over the world.
The whole point of my topic was to draw attention to the fact that this is one of many guides in horticulture not supported by research and one of several cases where I have not suffered consequences by ignoring such guidelines.
Yeah, you and almost everyone else. That is the point of my topic. Conventional methods don’t require endorsements and I’m really not interested in more testimonials of those who follow the standard rules. I often get excellent results when I break them. Which do you find more interesting and educational?
What would be more interesting is if someone had to use my method because of a pump outage or something and things ended up doing well… or not.
Hmmm, you crunched that statistic. I’m thinking about during drought in CA where people are restricted from watering their lawns.
Also, how many millions of trees are planted year- was that part of your calculation.
A few gallons for every newly planted tree in good soil that is already moist. That’s not a significant fraction of total agricultural water used
Those people would need to water in their trees because it’s a drought so your advice isn’t meaningful. They could also flush the toilet two less times or take a shower for three less minutes in order to make up for it
Wow, I wonder where this is coming from. Waste is waste and when I lived in CA I read many a sign over a toilet saying, If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down. Restaurants cannot offer water without request and lawns turn brown. Droughts are a repeating cycle there and lots of trees are planted there. Many farms are grandfathered in and pay very little for their water.
This topic is as much a thought piece as anything and I find it strange that the primary response isn’t one of interest and curiosity but opposition to an idea by people who probably never tried what I’m suggesting.
i also water the ground the before I dig and then dont water them in. I do this because it makes digging less challenging though. it sort of feels like 6 in one hand half dozen in another though because im still watering it its just before the tree goes in.
Being surrounded by the Great Lakes, water is in abundant supply. It is a little too wet here in the spring. Some areas are well draining so it’s not an issue. It is an issue in my yard and mounding trees has worked well for me. I use raised beds too, when feasible. My daughter’s orchard is much sandier. It has been a pleasure growing seedling trees on her property. We just prepped a peach seedling and a jujube tree. I’m adding my new trees there so my daughter’s orchard can care for our favorite fruits once I’m gone. It gives me an excuse to visit my daughter while I maintain the trees. Which now my daughter can do too. She is a natural grower., has a knack towards it. . Her first year of fruit was amazing and much better than my first year. I enjoy working with plants so much. Glad I can pass it along. Andrea my daughter is an executive at General motors and farms part time on her multi-acre property. It’s great to be on cutting edge tech innovations yet still can enjoy the simple life.
Potted plants I don’t water in. Bare root I do water in. They are often dry from mailing and it settles the soil a little. My version of soaking the roots before planting. Who knows if it really helps or not, just what I’ve always done.
Not necessarily, If the trees are planted in CA spring, the soil can be quite moist still in Feb even if the reservoirs do not have adequate water.
Why am I fielding this anyway. It is always best to do every job with the least amount of effort and materials to accomplish the same results. What’s more, what I’m talking about should be of interest to any serious gardener, IMO, no matter how you decide to run with it. It’s generally safest to run with the standard advice.
Every year for the last 35 I have planted scores of trees in my nursery without ever watering them in. For 25 years before that I treated my annual starts the same way. The only time I run a hose to them is when it fails to rain after planting and they need water in mid-May or June. That is a chore that takes a lot of time for me.
Incidentally, when you deeply water the trees they do not establish best water absorption until all the gravity pulled water has left the soil contacting the roots. This is why as many trees are killed by overwatering as inadequate watering.
My big order of trees from ACN that we are planting today, yesterday, tomorrow…. arrived tightly packed in boxes and packed extremely well. No drying out occured at all. Of course, I don’t know how the trees looked before they packed them for shipping. Not worried though.
I move them from the box into a trashcan full of water, maybe 15 at a time and plant them one at a time very quickly. I don’t know if it would be just as good to take them straight from the box, but this is how I’ve always done it. Packing didn’t always used to be so good.
Carl Whitcomb wrote in a book of his I have that when he spoke at a conference of nursery professionals revealing several lines of research he’d done that shattered long held myths about managing trees, including the one that cutting back trees when transplanting was helpful because it balanced the tree to its loss of roots (it turns out that a lot of restorative energy is in the very wood being removed, at least enough to counter negative affects of excessive transpiration), his audience became angry. They were offended to have their beliefs challenged.
I think some of that dynamic is in play here- not that I’m comparing my debatable observations with Whitcomb’s careful research, but there may be a parallel to that and the response this topic is receiving. . Maybe I shouldn’t bother. I find the responses here pretty annoying.
Of course, I’m not my most patient when under the stress of spring… my hell season.
I was always taught to water-in on transplanting, mainly so that it settles the soil around whatever roots exist, for good root contact, and it expels any air pockets. After that initial watering at the immediate root zone, if the plant is doing good I’ll tend to water a little further away to make roots expand outward in search for water.