This is very helpful. Thanks for the detailed reply.
Glad your trees all made it, and not surprising that they got knocked off kilter for a year or two. I started a new orchard 3 years ago and moved two trees. The Honeycrisp fruited second season after moving, and the Contender has yet to fruit (but peaches are challenging here). I used a wheelbarrow and tried to keep as much soil on the rootball as possible. It was very heavy and wouldn’t work for any longer moves.
“Where I live, part of the race is getting above the deer browse line and I also train my trees to support squirrel and coon baffles which requires a straight, branchless trunk for about the first 5’ of the tree.”
because I’m in town and have fences which let the critters come in from the top, and no deer, I have not had any issues either with shrubs that I replant this way- my bayberry were 4 or 5 when I moved them this way and they took off again the following year. the native plums were a few years old and I washed out as much roots as I could get, then plunked them in, in the fall, and they flowered this year (they’ve never fruited). I am moving an apple tree this year that’s about 4 years old and I plan to leave it alone up top too, that logic of the wood having energy in it- I’ll prune next fall after it gets settled in I think? all of my trees are opposite to yours, I want them short and busy and reachable by me.
I didn’t read the summary ai part but hearing your experience helps. I’m going to read a bit of his research for myself too now.
Has anyone tried moving mature trees with an excavator or other heavy equipment? I may be moving at some point in the next 1-2 years and have ~100 trees I’d want to move. The method I described earlier in this thread would take me a ton of time. I’m not ruling it out, but spending 2-4 hours * 100 to wash the dirt off the roots (not even taking into account the transport and planting) seems like a lot.
The new property (accepted offer, but haven’t closed yet) would be about 2X as large, at just over an acre. At a minimum, I’m thinking that after the existing trees are cleared, I can have an excavator dig holes at a pre-defined spacing and leave a pile of dirt next to each. That would make planting a lot easier- plop the tree in the hole and use a hoe to pull the dirt over the roots…
There’s a reason that for centuries large trees have been moved with the B and B method, but species vary a lot in their ability to be transplanted bare root at full size. Apples are the easiest I’ve moved- pears are probably the hardest. Usually you lose at least a year in recovery.
The question is, how much root you can pull out of the ground with the help of an excavator. I’ve never seen a landscaper use one to move big trees and I’ve seen some pretty impressively sized trees moved… in the middle of summer! That was a crazy operation at Martha Stewart’s old place in Westport. They simply moved enough dirt with the tree that the trees barely noticed.
As you know, I transplant scores of bearing age bare root fruit trees every year and have developed my own means of doing so- but these trees rarely exceed more than 2.5" diameter trunks. At sites of customers I’ve moved as large as 4" diameter apple trees and E. plums bare root using forks and spades- apples require less work than peaches to lift out their roots from the soil- peaches grow so fast that moving big ones probably wouldn’t be worth it.
Hopefully, someone here has used a powered fork driven by a tractor to dig up the roots of trees for transplant, but most people are afraid to move big trees bare root.
How long did it take you to move a 4" tree with fork and spade? Sounds like a full afternoon. What about the 2-2.5" that you normally do?
I haven’t done a full survey (just the jujubes so far), but I have at least 20 jujubes in the 2-3" range and half a dozen around 4-4.5". I have one which is almost 15 years old and ~7.5", which may need to stay.
Agreed- I don’t think I’ll move any of my peaches. Maybe I’ll get some new trees at Vaughn Nursery ($10.90 for a 3-4’ tree) and graft over them. They are on Guardian rootstock, which says it is also good for plums and apricots, so it wouldn’t hurt to have a few extra of them.
You’ve never seen them use an excavator, but have seen big trees moved? How did they do it? By hand?
I would really try to avoid that. I’m hoping to get it done over the late fall and early spring. I don’t think I would put in all that effort during the summer, given the high likelihood of failure.
At least the property is only a ~10 minute drive from my house. Though I imagine I’ll need to make that trip quite a few times. Maybe I’ll rent a truck from Lowes for the bigger trees, as I don’t really like making a trip with a tree hanging half-way out my minivan.
How well do Euro plums transplant? I’m not as concerned with apples, though I have a few I could move. But Euro plums seem to take forever to start producing. In fact, I have one I planted in 2016 which still hasn’t produced a single plum yet. And several from around then which have only made 1-5 plums. I’d hate to start from 0 on them…Though many of them are pretty big and will be hard to move.
I have relatively light soil and lay plastic sheeting about a foot down to encourage shallow rooting so apples pop out quickly, sometimes in 10 minutes, almost always well under 30. Peaches that can take up to 45 minutes to extract all the roots I want, but they are variable, depending on where there big roots decide to go.
\When we’ve done this my helper and I have been in top shape, and my helper is a machine. It surprised me how rapidly we’ve moved those big trees- ones two people can handle bareroot if you are just moving it less than a hundred feet. This as been with apple trees, and I don’t recall it taking a whole lot more than an hour or so.
7.5" diameter- I didn’t know they got that big. I know nothing of their root structure.
I’ve seen pretty big trees moved balled and burlapped , including those 10" diameter ones at MS. old place (to keep all that dirt from falling apart. I’ve dealt with a lot of tree-spade dug trees- they include a lot of unnecessary wait because they dig much deeper than they need. I had a tree spade dig up about 100 trees for me at a commercial orchard sold to become a McMansion. they had as much as 3" diameter and the soil was a clay. I could move over 20 of them at a time in the rack body truck I used to have by breaking the soil off the bags- that soil required the help of a machine. The clay tends to concentrate roots in smaller area, so the trees did fine- I just packed them all in wet leaves before driving them away.
Yeah, summer is not when anyone would choose to do transplants- older nurserymen would keep such trees in the shade with a mist keeping them moist, but the deep pocketed client was willing to pay crazy money to move tons of dirt with the trees. It was mostly done with hand tools, but I’m not sure the contractor was especially practical. Or the client didn’t want heavy machinery on the lawn.
Euro plums transplant fine- just control leaf-hoppers when the start to grow out the following spring- they are hell on E-plums but rarely affect the J’s.