Dan Hager from Hartney Greymont, a Davey company, in Concord, talks about the fall and spring planting seasons.
In this episode we cover:
To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.
To learn more about planting in the off season, read our blogs Is it Safe to Plant Trees in Summer? and Can You Plant Trees, Shrubs or Evergreens in the Winter?
To learn more about handling potted plants, read our blog Tree Planting Guide: 3 Methods of Planting Trees.
Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company
Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com.
Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!
Dan Hager from Hartney Greymont, a Davey company, in Concord, talks about the fall and spring planting seasons.
In this episode we cover:
To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.
To learn more about planting in the off season, read our blogs Is it Safe to Plant Trees in Summer? and Can You Plant Trees, Shrubs or Evergreens in the Winter?
To learn more about handling potted plants, read our blog Tree Planting Guide: 3 Methods of Planting Trees.
Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company
Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com.
Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!
Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davy Tree Expert Company's podcast Talking Trees. I'm your host Doug Oster. Each week our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast we know trees are the answer.
I'm joined this week by Dan Hager. He is a district manager in the Concord, Massachusetts office of the Davy Tree Expert Company. Dan, I want to welcome you to the show because I want to hear all about the pros and cons of spring planting trees, or fall planting trees. How are you?
Dan Hager: Thanks Doug. Great to be here. I'm doing very well.
Doug: If you had your druthers, when would you plant the trees?
Dan: 20 years ago.
Doug: [laughs] Very good.
Dan: The best time to plant a tree is whenever you can, but I guess the slightly better time would probably be in the fall, late August, September, October. Most trees in general are still able to get their roots set, and then that sets them up for the next growing season to be even
Doug: What are some of the mistakes that homeowners make when they are planting trees, and we'll talk about first in the fall.
Dan: Some of the common mistakes we see are planting too deep, over mulching, not watering enough. A lot of those cultural practices really hinder the trees growth. You want to be able to see the root flare of the tree which is where you can start to see the roots entered into the ground. If you're not seeing that root flare, you're digging a hole a little too deep, or dirt's piled up against the stem, which is going to because a bunch of problems down the road.
Girdling roots are roots that grow against the stem. If there's soil there, the roots will start growing in that soil and grow right across the stem.
Doug: One thing that surprised me that a Davey arborist showed me, was that I didn't know that even a plant that's in a pot sometimes can be buried in that pot too deep, and just to gently push that soil away until that root flare, right?
Dan: Absolutely. The other thing, you've got to be careful with the potted plant is when the roots hit the edge of that pot, they're going to start growing around the edge. It's going to create like a circular pattern, and that's also going to set those roots up to potentially girdle at the stem.
Doug: Now, that can be a scary thing for a homeowner to get in there, and cut those roots. How would you recommend someone does that? If you get into that pot, and it's been in there for two years, three years, who knows, and they're starting to spin around inside of that pot, how much of that can we tease apart?
Dan: You can prune some of them out, but you can also straighten them out a little bit. You can manually straighten them to grow away from the tree. If you dig your hole wide enough, which you should, so it loosens up the soil, and then place those roots in there, that'll help train those roots to grow away from the stem.
Doug: How do we know how big to dig that hole, compared to the size of the root ball?
Dan: You only want to dig that hole based on the diameter of the root ball itself. If the root ball is two feet in diameter, you want to go an additional foot past that, but the more, the better because it's going to loosen up that soil, decompact the soil, and make it easier for those roots to grow.
Doug: We want to keep that native soil as part of this planting process, right? Back in the day, they used to tell us put some compost in there, but now after doing this podcast, I realize that we'd rather have the native soil in there because the roots will keep going out into where we want them to go, right?
Dan: Absolutely. We generally want to backfill with the soil we've dug out of the hole, so it's consistent with what the roots are going to be growing into.
Doug: Okay. I'm going to choose my tree, right tree, right place. Would you prefer putting in a bigger tree or a smaller tree, or does it matter? It just depends on budget?
Dan: A little bit of budget, but if I would put in a slightly smaller tree, because that's going to be able to establish into the ground faster than the bigger tree. It's all about getting those roots to grow. The younger tree is going to put more energy into growing roots than a mature tree.
Doug: Dan, now you're saving me money. I like that. What about spring planting? What are the things we need to know about there? In fall, we know the tree's going to put on root growth. In the spring, it's going to want to put on top growth, and maybe flowers, and root growth. What are your suggestions there when we're spring planting?
Dan: For spring planting, we want to make sure there's definitely a good mulch ring that's going to help maintain the soil moisture through the heat of the summer. We're going to want to make sure there's supplemental water, make sure the tree has plenty of water to support that canopy growth as well as the root growth. Spring's a very popular time to plant because that's when, at least in our area, most plants are available. As long as it's done properly with supplemental watering, and mulching, there's really high success rates.
Doug: That watering is key. In a season like this, in our area, we had a period in May where we had 22 days without rain. If you had planted a tree in April, you would definitely want to get some water on that tree during that period.
Dan: Absolutely. Actually, for our area, in the New England area, we actually had the opposite. We almost had too much rain throughout the growing season. I had clients that was watering their trees as well as getting the rain, and they were starting to yellow-brown out in the center, and the soil was just saturated.
Doug: I asked this question a couple weeks ago to another arborist. For you and your season, would you prefer too dry or too wet? Which one of those is worse, or are they both as bad?
Dan: Either one is pretty bad. I would say we probably would rather have it too wet than too dry. Some seasons, though, you can't put enough water on a tree when it's dry. The soil becomes more compact, becomes hydrophobic, just doesn't want to take water up. It takes a lot of extra water to rehydrate that soil to begin with. I definitely would rather have too much rain.
Doug: I want to pick your brain a little bit about some of your favorite trees, and again, we always preface it with right tree, right place, but is there anything off the beaten path that when the time is right, you love to get into a landscape?
Dan: I think the sourwood is one of my favorite trees for an ornamental purpose. You get a late-season flower, you get the bright red leaves in the fall, its bark is attractive as well. I think it's one of the underutilized native trees for our area.
If we're talking larger shade trees, I like a big strong white oak. It just fills the space really nice. It has really nice architecture in the branches as it matures.
Doug: I just did a podcast recently with a local Pittsburgh arborist, Miles Stevens, and I know that he also has a sourwood in his own property, he's on the sourwood bandwagon, too. I've got one in my forest, too. Again, I say this all the time, maybe every podcast, but I live in a declining oak forest, and so I'm always looking for something else to put in there when I lose an oak, something to give the forest more diversity.
Talk a little bit about that when you're talking about planting at properties, the importance of diversity for the trees that you're choosing.
Dan: Absolutely. You need to have a diverse landscape that has many benefits. One, for the native insects, pollinators, having that low canopy up to the high canopy is going to feed all those insects, which is going to feed the birds, which is going to have huge ecological effects. If we could talk about monocultures and having problems with, if you have one single species in your tree, like what sounds like you have in your oak forest, the main species starts declining, all of them are going to decline. Happened with the elm trees, and Dutch elm disease. The more diverse you have, the less noticeable a loss will be if something gets into them.
Doug: Dan, tell me how you got into this. Why is this job right for you?
Dan: I got into this probably about 10 years ago. I was working in retail, and my now wife, who was actually a career counselor, found an arborist trainee job for me, and I applied, and because I had rock- climbing on my resume, they thought they'd give me a shot. I climbed my way up, if you will, throughout the years. Once I got into it, just absolutely fell in love with caring for trees. The physicality of it also was right up my alley. Shortly after I started, I knew that I was going to be going far in the industry.
Doug: Rock climbing to tree climbing, that's rather interesting, but it makes sense. That's a similar skill set, right?
Dan: It's a very similar skill set. Having the trust of a rope goes a real long way in being able to trust yourself, and not being afraid of heights, definitely.
Doug: Dan, that's why I stay on the ground and host these podcasts, because when I look up at those guys from Davey, and they're coming soon to my property to do some more work, it just scares me. Like you say, to trust the rope, to know all your safety rules. To me, it's an amazing thing to watch. Talk a little bit about the relationship you have with your clients. I always think it's cool that guys like you can go to a property, and you're looking over everything, and we're worried about our trees. We love our trees, and you can tell people, hey, that's not a problem, or we can just do this and that. Talk a little bit about that.
Dan: That's probably one of the most rewarding parts of the job, being able to walk into someone's property and say, here's what we need to do to help keep this tree get another 50, 100 years out of this tree. Working with people that have that preservation mindset, and forward thinking is absolutely one of the best parts of my job.
Doug: Let's get back to planting. What is your start and end to your season where you're at, where you can comfortably plant a tree? I know you don't want to do it, but sometimes you got to plant a tree in midsummer. Sometimes somebody like me, who's cheap, I'll come into a deal midsummer, and I'll be worried about planting that tree. For me, it's just keeping water on it. What is your season like for planting?
Dan: For the fall season, ideally we're going to start planting around September 1st. This year, with all the rain, easily could have gone away with the end of August. When we're planting in July and August, it's not necessarily the water, but it's also the heat. If it's too hot, plants, they'll start closing down their ability to photosynthesize. They're not going to leave it in the water all day long, but if they're not photosynthesizing, it's going to slow things down. We'll start around the end of August. For the right species and size, you can plant right as long as the ground's not frozen. I've put in yews in at the end of mid-November, and they took just fine, they're beautiful.
For the spring season, generally, I like to do our transplanting, or some of our deciduous flowering trees in the early spring if they're available. We might be looking at April. The bulk of it's going to go in May, June. By the end of June, we're shutting things down because again, because of that heat. The heat of the summers, it's really what we want to avoid.
Doug: I hate planting trees or shrubs mid-summer, and I rarely do it, but it's one of those things where if you get a deal, it's like, okay, I've got it. Would I be better off if I found a deal in mid-summer to just keep that plant in that pot, and just put it into a cooler location, shady location for a little bit until I could get to my planting time, or do you think I should put it in the summer, and cross my fingers and hope for the best?
Dan: I think that's a judgment call, but I think I would lean toward putting it in the ground. Having the natural soil in the ground, it's going to be better for the roots. The pots and even like raised garden beds, they tend to dry out faster being above the ground. You really got to keep them much more water intensive.
Doug: Dan, that was great stuff. I appreciate your time, and all that information. I love being able to pick your brain about these things that I'm doing in the garden, and in the forest. Thanks very much for spending some time with us. That was very informative and interesting.
Dan: Thanks for having me, Doug. I look forward to the next one you get to do.
Doug: Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davy Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Do me a favor, subscribe to the podcast, so you'll never miss an episode. If you've got an idea for a show or maybe a comment, send us an email at podcasts@davey.com, that's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S@D-A-V-E-Y.com. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.
[00:15:23] [END OF AUDIO]