Yes Colorado is a high plains dessert averaging about 15 inches of rainfall per year. Much of Kansas is the same but my area gets more than double that amount of moisture. Water is life and it’s valuable. Mountain water in Colorado is very high quality water. There is a reason they put the coors plant in Golden CO. it’s the best water I’ve ever drank. Colorado soil is challenging to work with. There around the golden area and Denver they seem to be able to grow most anything in limited amounts. Colorado is known for amazing produce such as peaches and peppers with intense flavors due to the unusual climate. Water is definately an issue there. Here in Kansas I bought the property where I live now because of the water available at times. The same reason I wanted the lower ground is why Noone wanted it. I wanted the water desperately as I know it’s valuable.
Something I would keep in mind is things like the Palisade peaches are grown in Palisade area which is a extreme microclimate for Colorado. Palisade is zone 7 which is 2+ zones over most in CO. Issue with the Denver and Golden area is prices are so dang high for housing or land. I swear by the time I move out I will have enough money to buy in cash myself because everyone in this area just buy houses in cash because they have so much money. The fruit here is pretty amazing though because we are so dry. We are just limited by our climate. This year we had a snow right before June for example. We know we will have a season sometime between May and at least September with most of our seasons going from May to October but some seasons it is cut short and others it is much longer. Many try to buy plants on mothers day and they all die. Many transplants here buy way before they should in March or on mothers day because they don’t understand our season.
The intense prices of things in Colorado and California are something I don’t understand. There is no water to speak of there yet housing triples in price in just a few years.
At my parents house in Bellevue they had small round gravel held together by concrete.
It takes swearing and dynamite to dig a hole there.
There’s something similar about 2-3’ below the surface at my lowest point, or 4-5’ down for most of the yard. Though not quite that compact, as tree roots seem to push through it without much trouble, based on the roots I’ve encountered on the few occasions I had to dig that deep. My trenching shovel did an ok job with a little extra jumping on it, but when I first hit that layer I thought I’d struck bedrock.
@clarkinks I forgot to mention it but I did plant a malus fusca (swamp apple) that I purchased from a west coast nursery. My hope was to use it as root stock for an interstem. It grew so poorly, maybe 2 inches at most, that I pulled it out. I am not sure whether to blame the poor performance on the mismatch between the plant site and its needs, on the fact that it was a pencil thin bare root or on my broadly deficient nurseryman’s skills. I think perhaps @Levers101 had a similar experience.
Years ago I dug post holes with a model T axle which is a 1 inch diameter steel rod around 6 feet long.
Yes - I had a very similar experience with M. fusca in Iowa. It isn’t climatological, but the soils (at least my poorish clay-till-beat-to-death-development soil). I’m very deficient in Zn and the pH is high so even if total values of Fe and Mn aren’t wildly out of wack, they aren’t very available.
After languishing for 3 years, my Kingston Black on M. fusca bit the dust this spring. I think it grew all of 2 inches in the 3 years in the ground.
Just to drive home this point of soil issues affecting M. fusca, I yanked a Yarlington Mill last spring that was also languishing and replaced it with a Franklin cider on M7. I potted that Yarlington Mill on M. fusca into the largest pot I had at the time and it proceeded to grow 2.5 feet in a summer (but from a side shoot on the main leader). It sure did like the, presumably low pH, peat moss laden potting mix I had laying about.
I’m still wondering how these trees would have done had I planted them in their original intended location, which was a low spot next to a crick that floods often. Pin oaks love it there, so the soil is more along the lines of what I bet the M. fusca would like.
Edit - Also I will add that there was no signs of delayed graft union failure or a weak union with M. fusca and the more likely to be “dirty” and virus infected old cider varieties.
I have clay soil, but I’m on a limestone ridge so it drains off quickly - too quickly mostly so the slow dense soil can’t grab any moisture unless it’s a long slow rain. I finally learned to plant everything in deep mounds of wood chips. The plant roots still can get minerals from the clay underneath but get a broad root system that spreads out. Droughts aren’t quite so scary now, but of course the shade tree roots will travel to get in on the party, too.
I once repaired a fireplace in an 180 year old house that just had a layer of stones for a foundation. The fireplace had been closed off for decades, and all the leaves that fell down the chimney had been composting that long. Perfect rich soil, and full of roots ! The big trees outside found that little patch of gold long before I did.
The soil pH were I planted the Malus fusca is a tad below neutral (~ 6.4). It is interesting to note that it grew some feet when you put it in the pot. Maybe I should have treated it like a blueberry bush.
I would be digging out and making clay all the time. then throwing leaves back on top and hoping for the best. I have a coworker who throws pottery and she’s always going to people’s places and digging for clay soil to process. she pulls the clay out with water soak then puts the debris and other soil back.
Okay. I expect this to be a bit of a test of the mound approach to planting apple trees in my area of poorly draining clay. The remnants of Ian gave us a fairly evenly dispersed 6"-ish of rain over the last 4 days. I expect the ground around the mounds to be squishy for another 2 or 3 days while things dry out. Although the temperatures have been much lower than in summer (highs only in the mid 60s), the trees are certainly not dormant and some, like Bramtot, were still putting out a few leaves. So… what signs of root rot might one keep an eye peeled for in mid-October? Any thoughts?
look at the base of your trees - they should not be cracked or weakened
Thanks for the photos… Out of curiosity, what was the fate of those trees?
It was a pear I took out of the ground and didnt want it to overwinter; it probably could have survived but it got replaced
how high are the mounds? that and how well draining the soil used to mound them makes a big difference in tree survival. i double the coarse DE and perlite in my mix used for my trees. my best results were promix with more perlite/DE added. then i put a lightly tamped 4in of woodchip mulch on that.
Mounds are a but over a foot high with an additional 3 inches or so of mulch. The soil in the mound is a mix of the clay underneath, commercial top soil with a bit of perlite and kitchen compost. I think it drains pretty well so I don’t worry too much about the top foot of roots. The area is sometimes wet in the spring for weeks with a concurrence of rain and melting snow. when we bought the place there were a couple of dead trees in the area. The mound planting is a bit of an experiment to see if the natural disadvantages of the location can be overcome.
What you see there is the bottom part is rootstock and the top part is scion. All grafted trees are joined like this.
i have heavy clay/ rocky soil here and every tree ive put directly in ground has slowly died. if you had the same experience, you wont regret doing it this way. i have over 60 plants trees done this way and they all flourished and still are 6 yrs later.