DIY – Plant a Tree in Your Yard
Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Organic Gardening on July 17, 2009
Alright, you’ve seen all the posters and ad campaigns telling you to “Plant a Tree, Save the Planet” and “Breathe Easy: Plant a Tree Today” or whatever. None of those, however, tell you how to actually go about planting a tree. Most people probably think it’s very easy. They’re right.
Recently, we were shopping at a hardware store looking at various things in the outdoor nursery. I was technically there for a roll of “fix everything” (aka duct tape) and a roll of band-aids (aka “electrical tape”), both of which are used a lot in my house, but who can go to the hardware store and not look at everything? Exactly, we’re only human. Emphasis on the “man” part. haha
So while I was looking at tools and things that make a lot of noise and stuff that could possibly be made into explosives, my wife went to the nursery to look at plants. When she found me again (I think I was pondering the difference between outdoor roof sealant and bathroom caulking), she had a tree in the shopping cart. Both the tree and the cart were new, so I noticed them right off.
Important rule of shopping, totally unrelated to this DIY: if you’re with a woman and she has a shopping cart, you’re soon going to be broke. If you’re with a man and have a shopping cart, it’s just a convenient device to prop your foot on while talking or lean on while pondering the differences between roof sealant and normal caulk.
OK, back on track. So we bought the little tree, which was looking a little frail and had obviously been in the pot too long, for a discount. It was the last one they had and they really wanted to get rid of it. So $12 got us a new cherry tree.
In our front yard, there was a tree that the previous owner of our house had poisoned to get rid of. It was perilously close to the driveway and he’d had to repair one portion of the drive due to the tree’s roots. He left it for me to chop down the dead tree, however. If you read my DIY for building a compost heap enclosure, you now know from which tree those limbs I used came from.
Now I know two things here that explain some stuff I’d need to know if I planned to utilize the same area for a new tree: the old tree was a birch, which have shallow root systems that spread widely. Cherry trees do not. Well, that’s not entirely true. Cherry trees of this type do not. Some of the larger varieties are a different story. This one only gets to be about 10 feet at the highest, usually more like eight. It’s also a deep-rooter.
So we began the process of planting the tree. Now for the good stuff. I’m done rambling.
The first step is to clear the sod from the area the tree will occupy. The hole needs to be about three times the circumference of the roots of the new tree and about half-again as deep as the roots are up to the first branches. In other words, if the tree is in a pot (like this one was), the hole should be 3x the width of the pot and 1.5x as deep as the pot.
To cut the sod, just run your shovel around the space to be lifted, cutting down straight into the dirt about four inches. Do this all the way around until you’ve made your outline. Then put the shovel under one corner, pointing at about a 45-degree angle and push. Do this all the way around the parameter. Lift the sod and repeat until you’ve gone all the way to the center, all the way around. You want about four inches of grass roots and dirt as the bottom of your sod. Roll it up or lift it out in one piece (if it’s that small). This can be transplanted elsewhere, which we did. You can see it in this picture to the left of the bare spot.
Now begin digging. As you can see, I had some help from Ebony there. He rolled in the dirt to test it’s viability for tree life, gave it his OK, and I began making a hole.
The soil in our front yard isn’t perfect for gardening in or anything, but it’s good dirt for sure. It has good consistency, if a little dry when I dug this time, and is the primary reason our grass looks as good as it does. Since I hardly do anything to really improve the grass other than fertilize it with organic grass pellets twice a year, there’s a lot o be said about this dirt.
It didn’t take long at all to get the hole dug. I put the soil into a wheelbarrow so it wouldn’t bury the grass around where the tree would be and so it’d be easy to refill the hole once the tree was in. As you can see from the photograph here, I went down fairly far, but it didn’t take me ten minutes of digging to do it. Not to bad, as I usually expect a lot of battles with rocks and whatever whenever I have to dig for any reason.
When that was done, I went and got some compost, a shovel full of dog poop, the last of my aforementioned lawn feritilizer, and a bucket of water that had been out for a while and was growing algae. I put all that into the hole, which filled about the bottom 1/3 of it.
There, I just let out the real secret of healthy, happy, newly planted trees. Plenty of garbage in the bottom of the hole (under the roots) to give them lots of food. I put a thin layer of dirt over that and then put the tree in.
A note on how to get your tree safely out of its pot might be in order here if you haven’t done this before. The easiest way, if the tree is large, is to lay it on its side, the bottom pointing at the hole. Gently pull on the bottom of the bucket while either holding onto the base of the tree (under the branches) or having someone else do so for leverage. Remove the bucket/bag/root covering and then slide the tree into the hole.
This tree, of course, was small, so I just lifted it from the bucket and set it in. I centered it in the hole and then began filling the hole with dirt, going around the tree evenly, burying the roots. This keeps the tree from tipping and allows you to periodically put a thick stick or your foot in there to compact the soil a little (not too much, but tamp it down so it’ll keep the tree in place).
Fill the hole all the way, heaping the soil up around the base of the tree in a mound. The soil will settle, so put plenty of it in there. In this case, I put all that I’d dug out back under the tree. If, after a few weeks, the soil is still a little high, you can always scrape it down to level and put the excess somewhere else.
We then put the hose on the tree’s base, running low so the water won’t tunnel into the soil, and went about transplanting the grass. Five or six minutes later, we came back and ran the hose around once more for good measure before calling it good.
For a couple of days and even up to maybe a week later, your tree will look pretty droopy and unhappy. Don’t worry, it’s just adjusting to its new lifestyle. Make sure to give it a little water every other day, but not too much. Just enough to soak the soil pretty good–maybe five or six minutes of water. Do this for about a week.
Depending on the weather and soil conditions, the tree will perk up quickly (ours is looking pretty good after only about five days). If the leaves haven’t begun to spread out again within a week, dig a “pilot hole” out to the edge of the original hole with a small shovel, taking care not to hit the new tree or its roots. Go down to roughly where the roots start and pour in some nutrient solution from the garden store.
Even when planting a tree at the “wrong time of year,” like we did here, you can get great results. So long as it was reasonably healthy when you got it into the hole, it will be fine.
I suspect that about ten years from now, we’ll have a nice shade tree on that side of our front yard, helping to shade the driveway and maybe that front window to our house, if it gets tall enough.
And one last picture, a special one for my BloggersBase.com friends. I finally figured out where hot dogs come from!
Take a bit outta that! haha
