i have heavy clay here that kills most trees if i plant in ground so i put a piece of cardboard down. push a tree stake through the middle of it. place your tree on the cardboard. tie it to the stake. mound a good draining potting mix.i like promix bx. water lightly. tamp. apply 3-4in of coarse woodchips. lightly water. tamp. water well. ive never lost a tree of bush planted this way and in 3-4 yrs the mound will have flattened. just planted 33 trees today in 2.5 hrs. using that method.
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I have found in my area where an early June frost is average, that planting frost sensitive plants close to the woods offers me 3-5 degrees of protection in spring. I put the hardier plants like apples and pears in the open pastures. I do mulch, but the effect on when the trees break dormancy is minimal. That may be due to the climate however, because everything breaks dormancy at about the same time here. For instance, apricots normally bloom only 3-4 days before the apples in May.
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The more I think and read about this topic, the more I think that the key is to choose late-blooming trees so spring frosts donāt damage the future crop, like what happened with Georgia peaches last year.
In New England weāve had an eerily warm winter, but that still comes with plenty of below-freezing temps including this spring. My Honeyberries are already putting out a few flowers, but itās going to snow hard this week. I think that going forward Iām going to select late-blooming trees/bushes where possible.
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I appreciate these arborists pushing the boundaries (literally) for the forests.
This bitternut hickory probably shouldnāt be thriving in the Cutfoot Experimental Forest in north-central Minnesota, near Grand Rapids. It likely began as a seedling in a nursery in Illinois, to the south, where deep freezes are less extreme. Normally, if a southern-adapted seedling is planted in an unsuitably cold climate like this one, it can risk frost damage and its survival is threatened. But the newcomerās lush, green foliage exudes good health. It is a promising sign in a project that aims to keep forests growing in a warming world.
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+1 on this. I spoke with a commercial grower from the mid-Fingerlakes region about ten years ago, and this was his strategy. I live at the farthest reaches of zone 5, and what we have (effectively) is a 20 day bloom period for all varieties- May 10 thru the 30th.
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Oh interesting! Thanks for sharing.
So youāre considering shade and its impact on temperature in where you plant.
Do you have any sources of passive heat/cool (or is it called thermal mass) like big boulders or concrete walls?
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I donāt. Just normal house siding. The trees have gone through one year, and funny enough my trees that receive the most shade (Contender and Blazingstar Peach) were the first two to start waking up this spring. Then again, our winter was incredibly mild and the ground didnāt freeze. I donāt have enough experience to say whether deliberate shading helped or hurt. But in comparison to the trees that were more open, it didnāt help (disclaimer: at my site with my trees this year). Iāll keep watching, though.
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They probably got their necessary chill hours sooner and therefore were quicker to bud out once it got warmer. Just a theory, but seems plausible at least.
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I wondered that, too, but I have to emphasize it beat out everything by about 2 weeks. Asian Plum, Asian Pear, even the Apricot, Cherry Plums, and Cherries. All trees which were put in positions where they got significantly more sunlight. Though, the peaches showed the earliest signs of waking but now literally everything else is leafing/blooming sooner.
All Iāve concluded is that Iām still new to this and have a lot for my trees and yard to teach me. Also, Best Laid Plans: 0. Mother Nature: 1!
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Ha ha I feel you on this one.
How are your cold hardy avocados going?
You know Iām going to be one of your first customers when you succeed at this!
I think raw hardiness is a much smaller part of a given speciesā adaptability to a given climate than most are apt to appreciate. Thereās also a tendency to conflate wholesale whether a species is endemic with whether it can and will thrive in a given climate. Thereās so much more to it though. Without a nearby seed source, no species will become endemic to a new place. Also, species tend to have somewhat more specialized āneedsā around germination and growing as seedlings, including things like dispersal, soil, forest (or other) ecological niche. You circumvent most or all of these narrow requirements through the act of planting and tending a given tree. So in my view, its a mistake, and a common one, to conflate these things.
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Could you expand upon this? Iām intriguedā¦
I first considered this ~20 years ago when I planted my first paw paws. People would often react by telling me that this was a foolish enterprise because āpaw paws donāt grow hereā and so implicitly they wonāt. Consider what happened after glaciation: species began migrating slowly (mostly) northward. You can imagine this proceeding at a granular level through actual dispersal. Trees like birches that make lots of light seeds that can be wind blown or carried by flowing water colonized rapidly, and there were periods of millenia where they were the only trees present. While it may be true that the climate has moderated, the lag in new species arriving was much more impacted by other things. Being endemic means not only that a species can live in a place but also that there are enough of them present and successfully competitive in the existing ecology so as to reproduce unfettered. The edge of where a species is endemic has to be able to expand from that edge point by overcoming certain obstacles, the first and most basic of which is distributing its seeds in physical space. Those seeds then need to be able to germinate (which anyone who grows trees from seed can tell you can be challenging) and compete in the existing ecology. If that ecology is grassland, vs forbs, vs a pine forest, vs a hardwood forest, itās going to have a serious impact on who can make the cut and grow there. Some plants are just better at colonizing than others, and they tend to have much broader adaptability.
Thereās lots to dig into and consider, but know that my paw paws are thriving here despite not being denizens of our local forest ecology. And in the intervening years, a number of those people who told me āpaw paws donāt grow hereā have gone on to plant them in their own yards
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