Plant a Tree - Preparing the Tree or Shrub to be Planted

Hi, I’m Mitch Baker with American Plant Food Company. We’re going to talk about properly preparing the tree or shrub to plant.

Now that we have the soil properly prepared, there are a few things you can place the plant in the hole. Now, let’s say your tree is growing in a container. Obviously, it’s going to come out of the container but you need to be careful removing it from the container.

So often, it’s a good to lay the tree down and gently coax it from the container, try not to disturb the roots too much. But, at this point, you want to encourage root development. So, place it in a hole like this where it maybe a root ball. It’s not going to break out of that shape so want it gently coax the roots from the root ball across the bottom, around the sides. You can use your fingers.

If you want to take a tool of some kind, you can do that as well. I’m not going to hurt it. This is absolutely important to encourage that root development. I’m using a bypass pruner. This is the kind of pruning shear that you would use to do trimming and pruning in the garden but it also has other purposes. In this case, we’re just gently scouring the side of the root ball. I’m not really cutting roots. We’re just loosening them slightly from the soil. That looks good.

Now, let’s say your tree or shrub is field grown, it has a root ball like this. It’s not grown in the container. It’s field grown so it’s going to come with burlap. It’s not necessary to remove the burlap but it’s also going to be tied around the base and you do want to make sure that you cut those ropes or twine from around the base of the plant. And if you like you can lay down the burlap back. It’s not necessary but make sure that you remove all of the twine, all the burlap from a crown of the plant. You don’t want to encourage any sort of fungal activity right at the crown so make sure that you lay that back and you’ve cut all of the rope, all of the twine from around the base of the tree or shrub.

It’s not necessary to remove the burlap. First of all, it’s not with the risk of having this root mass fall away so it will fall away from the roots. So, the burlap has no barrier to root development. Roots are going to grow to the burlap. The burlap will decompose over time so I would leave the burlap on. If you’d like to lay it back, that’s fine but you don’t want take a chance on that root ball breaking apart.

Alright, next we’re going to put the tree in the hole at the proper depth.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services