I planted Wowza last year in mostly dark soil you get from the store, with a very little touch of native soil (clay in my instant), was this a bad idea? Anyone got any fruit or (flowers) on the Wowza cherry tree?
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this is not a good idea, especially for cherry tree. I killed several this way. When first planting fruit trees, i followed some advise on youtube where you dig you hole and back fill with all these amendments. This works in sandy soil, it creates an in ground pot in most clay soils. So what will happen is that the water fills up in the nice loose soil you planted the tree in, but it doesn’t nicely soak into the below clay. so the roots will get longer exposer to essentially standing water, increasing the risk of rot. In my experience cherry trees, especially maz rootstock, do not tolerate this and die.
Personally, i would see if i could pull it up and replant with more native soil, then mulch with compost and then wood chips on top of that.
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I mixed with partially native soil but it’s all in a mix with sand dark soil and native. Is this good?
You want as much native soil in there as possible, especially with clay. Did you at least dig an extra wide hole?
What often happens is the roots will want to stay inside the loose soil and not penetrate the clay. The result is a root bound tree—basically a potted tree in the ground. The roots see the clay as an obstruction, and they’ll attempt to go around it, and round and round they go.
My soil is like potting clay. I dig wide, triangular holes to discourage the round and round effect. The roots find a corner and dig in. I backfill with only native soil.
Yeah I dug extra wide, I put a mixture of soils, and added some sand.
There was no clay that I put in but native soil, the width of the top of the hole I dug was about 2ft in diameter.
If your native soil isn’t clay you are probably fine.
It kinda is clay but the native soil was close to the top also kinda dark soil from 5 years ago and some real native soil from the ground but not much of that.
Keep an eye on it for the next few years. If it looks like the roots are circling, prune them and the canopy as well. If left to circle the hole they’ll eventually strangle themselves. If your hole was wide you will probably be fine.
At a year in you might be able to get away with replanting, but you’ll lose roots. You’ll want to prune the vegetation back so the smaller roots aren’t trying to support too many leaves. This is a judgement call. I’ve had decent luck transplanting bushes, but if it were me I’d leave it alone.
Alright that makes sense, it’s like a big pot kinda, my bigger tree is in a pot, since these were bush cherries I hope that the pot is a good size, if anything I can get a bigger one