319 How to Plant and Care for a Shade Tree

Show Transcript

319 TRANSCRIPT Shade Trees

Farmer Fred  0:00

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Farmer Fred

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener, or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

HOW TO PLANT AND CARE FOR A SHADE TREE, PT. 1

Farmer Fred

For many gardeners, late March and all of April is planting time for perennials, shrubs and trees. Today, we cover the basics of correctly planting and caring for a shade tree. We chat with consulting arborist Gordon Mann, who reminds us, when it comes to choosing a spot to plant a shade tree, it’s all about the soil. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

Plus, he explains the importance of correct planting techniques, especially freeing up that tree’s root zone.

But there’s a lot more. As Gordon Mann will explain, raising a tree is much like raising a child. It takes years of diligence on your part to see good results. It’s all in Episode 319 of today’s Garden Basics - How to Plant and Care for a Shade Tree. We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory, it’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Potsand Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

Farmer Fred

Do you have trees on your property? Well, trees are usually the largest and longest lived natural features on your property. Plus, they're worth a lot of money when you go to sell your home. So it pays to take care of the trees on your property. But do you know how? Well if you don't know how, that might be the time to call in a consulting arborist, especially if you think that there's going to be problems. if you see the tree leaning, or maybe branches are starting to break? Or there is some unusual shedding of bark or something like that? You want to call in a consulting arborist. Well, what is a consulting arborist? Let's check in with Gordon Mann, he happens to be a consulting arborist and he has a company called Mannmade Resources, serving Northern California for residences, businesses, and agencies. He’s been doing it for more than three decades, and he wants your trees to succeed. But the only way those trees can succeed is if you do the right thing, and treat them right. And as I've been saying on this program for how many years now, it's all about the soil. And that's so true when it comes with trees, as well. Gordon, a pleasure talking with you. And I hope we can shed some light for people to help them take better care of their trees.

Gordon Mann  2:53

Fred, I appreciate the opportunity to share some information with you. And actually I've been doing this for about 45 years. And seven years ago, Mann Made Resources shifted our consulting to California Tree and Landscape Consulting, Cal TLC. And that's where the consulting comes from. They also, in July, started the Institute for Soil Genomics, for very healthy community forests. And the idea is to help people learn how to get our soils back to their natural form.

Farmer Fred  3:27

And I bet right now people are wondering, well, wait a minute, what is a consulting arborist? So why don't you explain the difference between a regular arborist and a consulting arborist?

Gordon Mann  3:37

The consulting arborist should be someone with enough experience to come out and make an inspection on the property of the trees and figure out what any of the issues are that are impacting the tree health or the tree condition. Usually the consulting arborist is not part of a tree care company. Because most tree care company salespeople show up to your property to sell tree work. There are several of them that will give some consulting out. But their job is to sell tree care, otherwise, the company goes out of business. Nobody could just keep giving free information and stay in business for their careers. So we do charge for independent, unbiased inspections of the trees, and offer the most scientific ways to help the trees grow and stay healthy. Or, if the trees have some issues, how to treat the issues, instead of just saying the trees have to be trimmed or have to be removed. We give options and mitigation options for any issues on the property.

Farmer Fred  4:43

And just like you would visit a doctor regularly or a dentist regularly, if you have trees on your property, and especially if they're full grown trees that could be worth thousands of dollars when the time comes to sell your property, you might want to call in a consulting arborist every few years to just do a general survey of your urban forest.

Gordon Mann  5:03

I agree with you. And I'm not just trying to sell our work. Any asset that we have requires some kind of preventative maintenance or regular maintenance. We think about all the things in our homes and our cars, and we do things to take care of them. No one drives their car until the engine seizes because they never changed the oil. And trees, being a very valuable asset to our property and part of the community canopy, are very important and do need to be inspected occasionally. We help the property owners learn how to manage their trees structure and health in appropriate manner.

Farmer Fred  5:42

And to find a consulting arborist new near you, there are a couple of good resources out there that can help you pinpoint somebody locally who can help you out. I know there's the International Society of Arboriculture, with their website, treesaregood.com . That’s where you can find a list of arborists and consulting arborists. But also there's one specifically for finding a consulting arborist, the American Society of Consulting Arborists ( https://www.asca-consultants.org ).

Gordon Mann  6:07

Both those have arborists that are either certified or with ASCA registered. Consulting arborists can help you inspect the site and give you the information you need to take better care of your trees. And hopefully the person that comes out is talking to you about growing better trees and keeping the trees healthy. And helping you understand what we can do to avoid unplanned failures as much as possible. None of us are able to look completely below the ground. But we can look at differences in the site conditions, the tree trunks and sometimes the roots. What we normally do is we make as much assessment as we can from what we can visually see from the ground. And then, if we come up with some things that we need more information on, there's called advanced assessments, where people might go up in the air and climb the tree to do a aerial inspection and look at what's up in the branches close up or actually excavate the soil. So those of us without X-ray vision can actually see the roots. Also, we have things we can do like tomography or resistance drilling and find out what level of decay is in trunks that might have no apparent openings that we can see inside but sound hollow and we use a mallet to check the quality of the wood.

Farmer Fred  7:33

The American Society of Consulting Arborists, their website is asca-consultants.org . And we will have a link to both the American Society of Consulting Arborists and the International Society of Arboriculture in today's show notes as well, I know you've been going around giving presentations on tree health. And I'm amazed at the resiliency of trees. Even though, to the naked eye, they might appear to be healthy, they could be stressed, because they were started poorly and not the least of which is when they may have been planted, when the housing development you live in was finally landscaped. Usually, landscape goes in as the very last thing, after all the construction work. And that initial landscape is being installed on compacted soil and maybe very little topsoil just because of the construction process.

Gordon Mann  8:30

Yes, Fred. It's really sad how when we look at the difference in how trees have grown in our communities from 50 years ago to current times, they used to build individual houses, they didn't scrape the entire site of all the topsoil off and compact it so they can build the houses so they don't settle. And then they come in with four inches of topsoil and try and get the trees to grow. I hope some of your listeners have actually had the opportunity to walk into wildland areas, or forests. We have so many national forests in our area, and county forests and things like that, where we can actually see how trees grow naturally. And hopefully they walk across a duff layer. that is a tree's natural fertilizer, a natural way to restore the soils with the elements that it needs to function properly. So soils and soil genomics are very much like the human gut. There's so much more information now about the biomes and things going on in the human gut that help our bodies care for themselves. The soils are the exact same way. And there's so many fungi and bacteria in the soil that helped promote earthworms and other things that are happening in the soil that sometimes you need a microscope to look at. And when we scrape the organic matter off the top of the soil and we compact it, then it eliminates a lot of how those organisms can grow. It changes the soil porosity and permeability, it changes the soil aeration. And most people just think that tree roots need water. But roots need both air and water, because they're living cells, and cells need oxygen. And most of the microbiomes in the soil are not anaerobic. So they also need oxygen and air. At the institute we do actual soil tests, not the normal one that goes through the local cooperative extension agencies that some of the soil testing that is done that just talks about the elements in fertilizer, the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and pH. But we actually look at up to 120,000, microorganisms, both bacteria and fungi, and what's missing, and it looks at what nutrients that are actually tied up in the soil and unavailable to the plant. Because the bacteria and fungi that help the roots that are extracted from the soil are damaged or missing. And the other thing humans do really well (unfortunately) is we clean our soil. We rake in the fall, removing the organic matter and all the leaves, taking any loose organic material off the soil. And those layers of leaves and organic matter does two things. It protects the soil from the sun. So otherwise it's soil that's kind of like a brick. So anytime you get water, it usually runs off until the soil gets so saturated that finally does soak in a little bit. Or it does just run off and it never goes deep into the soil. And because the soil is baked, the organic matter and the fungi and bacteria that are in the shallow areas of the soil that normally replenish the soil are actually either killed or lost. And we have very poor quality soils.

Farmer Fred  11:52

Earlier on, you mentioned the word, “duff”. And some people are probably thinking, why is he talking about a fictional beer from “The Simpsons?” Duff is another word for mulch, and it's the fallen leaves and the small branches that basically carpet a forest floor. That is their mulch, it's an actual mulch, just like we're always talking about the benefits of mulching your garden because it moderates soil temperature, it moderates soil moisture loss. It helps aerate the soil; as it breaks down, it builds up the microbiology in the soil. And also, when you get a heavy rainstorm, that layer of mulch can also help break up the impact of the water on the soil. Because on bare soil when it rains really hard, it actually compacts the soil more, removing the air. So that duff layer - that mulch layer - helps that water more slowly trickle into the soil. So the water penetrates deeper, too. Besides, don't rake your forest. Maybe reconsider those leaves that are falling from your trees every fall. I've gotten into the habit of collecting the neighborhood oak leaves and grinding them up with either my mulching mower or my string trimmer and spreading the chopped leaves around my garden to help improve the soil during the winter. I’ll do that if I'm not planting a cover crop.

Gordon Mann  13:10

Yeah, Fred, you've got such a great method, the least expensive way to care for your soils. Most tree care companies, when they grind up the chips, we can still get them to drop them off at our house for almost for free, without having to haul them away to the dump. And wood chips around trees are the best. And the natural organic matter of whether it's a crop, a plant, or a bush or a tree is what those plants are used to growing in normal nature. And as humans, we think we're doing the right thing by pulling them out. And we have this great behavior as humans of treating everything like they're human. We do all these similes and things of how nature would act as a human is probably a better way to put that, and it's not correct. And there's also some new mulch products out there that people can use such as nut husks, and hazelnuts and maybe butternut. We don't want to use walnuts because they have some allelopathy to them which can be a little bit aggressive to other competing plants. But the other mulches are creating a nice mulch layer that we can put over the soil and actually do the breakdown of organic matter like you're talking about. And unfortunately when we add mulch, it's not a one time and you’re done. We have to add mulch again after it breaks down. But that's what helps keep the soil in a well functioning condition.

Farmer Fred  14:38

You've been going around doing demonstrations and talks about Healthy Soil for Healthy Trees. And you talk about the basic building blocks for cultivating a healthy tree life. What's in that soil for a healthy tree? Water, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese zinc, copper, boron, Molybdenum.

Gordon Mann  15:00

Yeah, there's excellent polysaccharides, ESPs, and more.

Farmer Fred  15:07

But what's interesting is all of those soil elements can be accomplished with adding organic matter. Directly.

Gordon Mann  15:16

Humans are so used to taking two tablets and call me in the morning and give me a pill to take care of what I'm doing that we think that by fertilizing our trees, we're helping with the exact same thing.

Farmer Fred  15:28

Now we're not talking fruit trees here. We're talking ornamental trees.

Gordon Mann  15:32

Ornamental trees, right. Okay. And  even fruit trees, there's some fertilizers that are specific towards improving the fruit production. And that's different than just trying to throw extra nitrogen and stuff in the soil to get it to grow faster.

Farmer Fred  15:47

And we have talked about nitrogen on this program about how it does spur new weak growth that's very attractive to insect activity and not necessarily good insects either. And the same is true, if you start adding fertilizer to a tree that doesn't need fertilizer. iI it's got that layer of leaves on the ground, that's enough to feed that tree, isn't it?

Gordon Mann  16:12

It usually is. And again, because we start with soil that was not natural, and then we're changing it, that some of the things in the soil are not there. And trees typically only need two things, water and organic matter. The organic matter will break down and improve the soils and help the roots do their job and help them break down what's in the soil, and free up the elements that they need to grow. And by creating enough organic matter, which builds up the bacteria and the fungi in the soil, and the biodiversity helps the trees be more healthy. But typically, the humans think we want something to turn around overnight. And so we don't give the soil the chance to do the long term development that it needs. That's going to eliminate the need to do all these shots of nutrients that we get from fertilizers.

Farmer Fred  17:05

Let's talk about your travels throughout Northern California and assessing, especially, backyard trees and residential trees. What are most of the problems you're seeing associated with those trees?

Gordon Mann  17:18

it was probably what we saw that was a result of the drought. The wonderful (not really) way the state of California manages its water, instead of trying to help people be educated and they say, “we all have to use less water”. And we all have to do these things properly and deep watering our trees and not so much throwing the shallow water on the turf, and not relying on how much rain we get each year to how we are going to behave. Unfortunately, that's what the state does. And so when people tell you, you have to stop watering their grass, they also stopped watering their trees. One of the things we designed was what we called stealth tree watering, where we have people dig a 12 inch wide excavation of their lawn and put a soaker hose in that spiral excavation, covering it with mulch, and then very slowly turning on the water so it bleeds out very slowly and drips into the ground and actually does go into the soil without greening up the grass next to it. The mulch helps cover it, so no one can see it, and they can keep their trees alive. Because as soon as people cut off the water to their lawns, they're cutting off the water to their trees as well. And unfortunately, most of the trees have learned to rely on that water from the turf watering.

Farmer Fred  18:38

And that tree may not even be in the turf and may be adjacent to it. But a tree's roots can travel a long way. And they'll go a long way to find water.

Gordon Mann  18:46

Correct. And one of the problems we have with most of our nursery stock is that they're grown in containers. And more people are trying to use air pruning to stop the roots from circling. But as soon as we pull a tree out of a container, we can see all the roots that have circled. And if we're fortunate, and the people growing it every time they moved it from a smaller container to the next larger one, they actually did root pruning to get rid of the circling roots. The only roots we have to deal with at planting are that last layer of circling roots where we have to either prune them or something because they don't just go. “I’m free!, I'm out of the container!”. They stay right where they're at, even after we pull them out. And the people that just stick it in the ground like a wine cork, the tree roots are  going to continue to grow in a circle. And the first thing I do when I visit people's property with young trees is I give the tree a little shake. I grab it anywhere from 12 to 30 inches above the ground and wiggle it. And if I can see the container-sized soil moving in the ground, the tree is not rooting well. And the choices we have then are: we can root prune it right then, if it's been really recent, we could pull it out and transplant it. Or we could try transplanting it if it’s been in the ground for a while as well as root pruning it and replanting it with a much more healthy structural root system.

Farmer Fred  20:09

We’ll have link in the show notes today about the correct way to plant a tree. And you have to pay attention to the hole, I think the The old saying is dig a $10 hole for a $5 tree or something along those lines. But basically, that hole should be wide, not necessarily deep, but wide. And when you plant that tree, too, maybe if those roots are going round and round in that root ball, is to score the root ball with a sharp object on four sides and maybe across the bottom, and try to spread the roots out so that they will go out and help fill in that space that you just dug out like a six foot diameter, maybe 10-12 inches deep, it depends on the size of the container that you're planting. And by the way, don't plant your trees in containers. Take them out of the container first.

Gordon Mann  20:56

Yes, and you know, it's really interesting, the Sacramento Tree Foundation has had this pedestal method of planting trees pretty much for the last 30 years. And when I brought that up at the industry standards meeting, my co workers and my professionals around the country called it a boutique planting method, which kind of shocked me, because our volunteers do that all the time with very little training. When you dig the hole too deep and put the soil back on it, we can't compact it to the type of aerated density that it was before we excavated it. And so the tree will settle. And one of the number one ways to kill trees is to plant them too deep. So the pedestal method is we take the tree out of the container, we measure what the depth of the root ball is, then we dig where the tree is going to go to only that height or even that height less one inch. And then around the outside of where that pedestal for the tree is going to sit, you can go as crazy as you want. With your excavation,  we usually recommend at least two times the root ball diameter, but you can go 3-4-5 times the root diameter and outside of the pedestal, you can dig deeper. And if you have a hard pan outside the pedestal, you could punch through the hard pan so the water can actually drain through the planting hole. And you can create a really wonderful environment for your tree to grow. And because we're talking about organic matter and things, a lot of the soils we have don't have organic matter. And that's where the mulch we're putting on comes in. And then we water the tree. The only roots the tree has, whether it's evolved in burlap or a container, is the roots that are moved on to the site. So we have to keep that root ball moist. And then we have to slowly expand the moisture outside the root ball so the roots can grow outside the root ball. And the more we loosen and break up the soil and the digging those bigger holes, the better the air and water can actually flow in what was the original compacted soils in most developed neighborhoods or sites.

Farmer Fred  23:07

Many people when they're planting a tree, they want to do the tree a favor, and they buy some really nice potting soil or potting mix, and they don't reuse the native soil there. Instead they'll just fill up the hole with potting mix, that can be a negative can’t it?

Gordon Mann  23:25

It can be. The bigger the hole you dig and the more you mix in some of the potting soil so you increase some of the organic matter and that really large site, the better off it is. Because as the roots do grow with the soil genomics and biomes, they pull those things with them and they keep moving them through the soil. But I wouldn't replace it completely. I would just mix in some organic matter, maybe up to eight or 10% at the maximum,  into the soils. And I would do it over the entire area that I dig out, a really large area, and that may help the tree establish a little faster.

Farmer Fred  24:06

And you mentioned, too, that you add mulch. But that mulch is only a top dressing, Correct?

Gordon Mann  24:10

Correct. If you're  using topsoil, it usually is a combination of a silt- loam, which will have both clay and loam in it. It will have some organic matter as well that is light. You don't want heavier organic matter. You do want lighter organic matter and then you add more to the surface and let it slowly get broken down and move through the soil.

Farmer Fred  24:33

Yeah, we should point out, too, that if you're adding compost to that hole, even if it's just eight or 10%, Compost tends to break down, so it's going to settle. So you do not want to plant compost beneath the tree. You want that pedestal to be on the native soil I would think.

Gordon Mann  24:50

Native, unexcavated soil. You want that to be unbroken up. Because as soon as we loosen it up and put it back in the hole it does settle. All the people that do root grinding and all that they take the wood in the dirt, they grind it up, pulverized, and they usually mound it. And then within a couple of years that mound is level because that stuff naturally settles.

Farmer Fred  25:13

Which is exactly why you need to replace mulch every few years because  it's  really a living thing, and it's breaking down. iI’s feeding the soil. So you're really helping out your trees and your shrubs, when you do use a natural mulch, like chipped and shredded tree branches. Now one good tip I know for planting that tree at the correct level where you want about one inch of the existing soil ball of the tree from the container above grade, is to lay your shovel across the hole and then when you place that tree soil ball on that pedestal, you want that top one inch of the existing soil ball to be just about a little bit higher than your shovel.

Gordon Mann  25:55

Yes. And also once you take the tree out of the containers, sometimes the root ball starts to disintegrate. That's what soil does. It falls apart. It's not supposed to be packed together like a clay thing you make pottery out of . And so by having it higher, if you do get a little bit of the bottom to fall away, you still won’t plant the tree too deep.

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HOW TO PLANT AND CARE FOR A SHADE TREE, PT. 2

Farmer Fred

We're talking about how to plant a tree and a lot more, with consulting arborist Gordon Mann. And one of the topics that comes up whenever it involves tree planting is, you want a tree for privacy? Can you do that? Let's find out how.

Farmer Fred

And I guess we should get into one reason why people like to plant trees, is for privacy. I remember years ago during a technical advisory committee meeting at the Sacramento Tree Foundation, there was this rush to try to find tall growing, fast growing, narrow trees for compact backyards to give people the privacy they wanted. And usually as a result, and this has been going on for 30-40 years, they tend to plant the trees too close together, in their attempt to try to get instant privacy.

Gordon Mann  29:31

Yes. And even landscape architects, they're taking a site that has nothing and trying to make it look attractive. They're going to put the trees very close together just because you want it to look nice. Otherwise it looks like a desert, with a couple of trees on it. And so they do put things together. The only benefit about that is because they have so much irrigation for the initial trees, that for the ones we're going to keep on the site over time to grow, they already have irrigation in place. Because they have additional irrigation for trees that will probably be removed, because they're over planted. And they're growing the canopies together.

Farmer Fred  30:05

And that’s causing all sorts of other problems too, usually with fences, because they tend to plan that row for a privacy screen way too close to a fence line.

Gordon Mann  30:16

Yes. And, again, we think about what we're doing from our side of the fence, and not the other side of the fence. And if you're a property owner, and your tree is going on to my property, I have the right to prune it back to the fence line, as long as I don't kill the tree. And don't do too aggressive pruning. And if you want to keep the tree with the kind of balanced canopy or a balanced crown, it should be planted a little bit in from  the edge of the fence plus then, the roots are going to have less impact on the neighbors. And if I do have to do root pruning and put a barrier in, earlier in the trees life, I do that. And the farther from the trunk I do that, the more natural root system I'm going to have with that tree as it grows bigger. The worst time to root prune is when the tree has got large woody roots. Because if we cut that root close to the tree, everything that extends outward from the point we cut is lost.

Farmer Fred  31:09

Yeah, and sometimes those trees could be supporting each other.

Gordon Mann  31:13

Yes,