I plant so the root flair is on a 8" mound that I expect to settle down to a 3-4" mound over a couple years, especially if you amend with compost at planting. This is for handling a backyard with poor drainage.
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i have the same problem. mine are about the same height. instead of cutting sod i just covered it with card board, piled on the soil and planted in that. i also drove a stake thru the cardboard, deep enough to support the tree until the roots anchored in the soil under the cardboard. done it for 5 yrs. for 30+ trees and bushes and everything is growing good. so much so that the growth rate surpassed plants i put in the ground much earlier. i also applied a 3in layer of wood chips to keep the soil in place.
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I agree with BlueBerry - You do what you have to do. I’m sure mine are over kill, but I plant them on a yard or two of soil. Maybe a foot or so high and 8 or 10 feet wide.
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@alan: a friend 7B Maryland wants to grow apples, pears, peaches, figs, blackberries on silt loam with high clay content, perched water table winter and spring, not classed as hydric but the next step up. It now grows corn, soybeans. You mention in several posts over the years that you sometimes plant on mounds. Roughly what size? Any way to reduce mound erosion or do you plan on adding soil from time to time?
In my opinion planting in mounds is a waste of time unless you make very large mounds. The dirt will just erode away and settle if the mounds are small. Planting in a 4ft 4ft x 1ft raised container works for me (but may not be right for you). I make most of the containers out of wood but I have done some out of landscaping stone. Stone looks better but wood is much cheaper. Not sure where your friend is in Maryland but I have lived in southern MD and outside of Baltimore as a child. The water table is generally very close to the surface in southern Maryland so I imagine raised containers being a huge plus. .
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For permanent mounds (or long lasting) bottomless boxes can be constructed. There is a site I used to manage that had semi-dwarf apples in such boxes constructed out of pressure treated wood. They were 4’X4’X4’ I think.
I manage another successful orchard that uses artificial but attractive landscape stones to created wider not as tall mounds- more like 2’ over blue clay you could make pots out of. The soil is so bad that they are useful at reducing tree vigor in probably even enhancing brix levels in spite of continuous access to water. They must be about 6’ diameter circles. I filled them with a mixture of sand and compost but probably high quality, sandy top-soil would work as well. I also blended some of the clay into the first half of the new soil profile.
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Thanks Alan!
We’ll try to find a substitute for pressure treated wood; see if my friend is up for some construction.
I’ve got an idea that persimmon and pear would do ok without the mound; not sure about apple, M111 supposed to tolerate wet feet; but peach, fig and blackberry definitely need the mound.
Wonder if without the box the eventual tree roots plus heavy woodchip mulch would keep soil erosion on the mound to a minimum?
thats the size i use except i use white cedar for wood. looks nice once the cedar ages some. my bushes are in low mounds. my trees are all in raised boxes.
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The boxes were constructed about 50 years ago. I hate to think of the toxins that has held the wood together so long. In my woods there are slow growth red cedars that started growing when they stopped farming the land a century ago. Maples, ashes, tulips, birches and oaks outgrew them so they became understory trees of almost all red heartwood. Even dead trees laying on the ground take about 4 decades to rot.
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the white cedars here are mostly growing in large stands in swamps and can take just as long to rot. they are mostly used for cedar shingles and boards for board and batten houses/ garages. only rot resistant wood we have here. i get the seconds boards with some rot/ knots in them. cut out the bad side and use the rest. get them for near nothing as they are sold as kindling.
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I forgot to mention that most of my raised mounds are only protected with landscape fabric and mulch. You can always shovel erosion back up as long as you don’t do too much at once. These I usually create 8’ diameter rings that are raised about 20’’ at first, but they settle. Be careful about shoveling soil onto mulch, though. It can tie up the nitrogen big time as bacteria work on the mulch.
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i put fresh 4in. off fresh mulch on every spring. it mostly stays in place but once in awhile ill go around with the rake to pull some back higher on the mounds.
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Alan- When you’re working on a tree in the middle of an eight foot mound, do you climb up on that mound to prune or train branches? Or do you try to stay off the mound?
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The mound settles to maybe a 16" rise, so it isn’t really a matter of much climbing up but I get right up to a tree I’m pruning and don’t worry about compaction. With a wood-chip mulch and a light soil that isn’t going to happen. Erosion won’t be caused by this either.
I once planted in an area that had standing water until mid-spring every year and it would return during wet spells. In this case I made the mounds about 3’ high after settling. The peach trees and everything else were, if anything, excessively vegetative. I’ve never had trees establish so quickly.
That was a long time ago, and I lost the account due to frustration by the client of constantly losing fruit to squirrels, so I can’t tell you how the trees fared once they settled down. He probably abandoned them.
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Just curious @alan, how exactly do you situate the landscape fabric when using mounds?
I have an area around my house that has a very thin layer of topsoil with rock and clay/hardpan beneath it. To make matters worse, there are large trees with very invasive root systems just on the other side of the fence growing into these areas. I don’t know the variety of these trees, but the roots literally carpet just below the soil surface and require a huge amount of effort to remove. These roots will creep up to 75 feet underground and spring up new stands of these obnoxious trees if the area is not mowed continuously.
I have taken to planting my fruit trees in this area on mounds after seeing how quickly the roots from the neighbors trees started strangling out my new plantings.
In this location infested with roots from next door I dig a shallow depression up to 6 feet across in size and try to remove as many of the foreign roots as possible. Hacking the roots out doesn’t keep them at bay for long as they are very fast to grow back.
After digging a shallow root free area I begin placing landscape cloth over top of the native soil to hopefully prevent foreign root intrusion. On top of the landscape cloth I’d build a hump of decent soil mixed with compost at least several feet high. I plant the tree at the top of the mound and then cover it in a heavy layer of wood chips.
This was the only way I could think of to give my small new fruit trees a good growing environment where they’d have a chance to develop without being strangled out by other invasive roots.
My new fruit trees are all on dwarf rootstock and staked, and I have no intention of letting them grow any higher than 6-7 feet. This was the only way I could think of to allow the trees to get established in this area without getting out competed by the other much larger root systems carpeting the area. Unfortunately, I can’t just take a chain saw to my neighbors pestilence growing next door, so this seemed my only option.
I couldn’t find any information about using landscape fabric in this manner when planting fruit trees, so I just took my chances that this will work out. As the trees are to be kept small anyways, I figured restricting the area the trees roots could expand to really wasn’t that bad an idea.
Was this a good method to plant these trees given the poor native soil, and pressure from much larger preexisting trees close by on the other side of the fence?
The fruit trees I planted in this manner seem to be doing alright so far, but I’m unsure of their long term chances. I planted a Satsuma tree in the native soil two years ago, and it was my most vigorous new plant in its first year. This year the Satsuma barely put on any new growth at all. I have the feeling it is being choked out by these invasive roots, and I plan to dig it up this winter once dormant. I was planning to put down landscape cloth again and build another mound for this tree and replant it in the same location. I’m sure I will find it is being strangled out when I dig it up, as I was stunned to see how quickly these invasive roots grew into another tree I moved after only being in place for 6 months.
Is this a sound method of planting, or am I making a big mistake planting in this manner in your opinion @alan.
Any feedback you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
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I would be tempted to use a trench digger towards the neighbors edge of my property and fold a few layers of woven landscape fabric as an undergound root fence- or copper screen. A deep enough trench around the mound I would build for each tree could also work, If it is compacted enough down low to stop the invading roots from going down and then up.
Many gardeners do not understand how strongly established trees of most species compete with newly planted trees and how cutting their roots inspires a riot of new root growth at the point of the cut, in the same manner as stub pruning a branch. Maybe if you treated the suckers with roundup it might weaken your neighbors trees and possibly even kill them. I’m not sure of what the ethics are on this one, but they sound like tree monsters I would enjoy killing. They are invading your property so armed resistance may be justified.
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From the photos it looks like the land has a decent slope for drainage. Are you mounding from concerns about drainage or just a general planting question.
Even though I mount soil I am always surprised after a year or more how much it settles…even with all the tamping I do at planting.
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That would be the ideal solution. Unfortunately, there are 2 water pipes located close to the fence. The water pipes run probably over 300 feet closely adjacent to the fenceline, so that really wasn’t an option when I began planting. Now I have many trees planted in this area, so it’s a bit late to get heavy equipment in their now.
I would love to kill these trees, but I am adjacent to the lake used as the local water supply. I use no pesticides or harsh herbicides on my property for this reason.
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Trench diggers aren’t heavy equipment, but I don’t know how deep they can go.
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I just loath the idea of miscalculation and penetrating the water pipes that provide water for the entire property.
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