Live Oak Planting

This week, Simmons Oak Farms added a Live Oak, Quercus virginiana, to the Cameron County Master Gardener Arboretum.   The planting bed is surrounded by sidewalk that leads up to the outdoor classroom.   What a pleasant stroll it will be up that sidewalk when it's shaded by oak branches.

We have a new tool that removes the RootMaker bag from the rootball.   Attached to a power drill, it rips the bag right off, disturbing the roots much less than removing it by hand.    This is the first time that we ever used a Treegator.    This tree has a 5" caliper trunk so we zipped two together.  They each will hold 20 gallons of water.   The "gator" then emits the water over the  next 8 hours - slowly soaking the rootball - RIGHT where it's needed.    According to the instructions, a once weekly irrigation is all you need to get your shade tree well established.

We did purchase a box of these Treegators and will have them available for customers who might need one or two.  One of the best things is that it is re-usable (and guaranteed for two years).

More room for big trees

This is our new holding yard - tomorrow we begin harvesting Southern Live Oaks that are 5" to 6" caliper and containerizing them. The diameter of their rootball will go from 24" to 40". The original plan was to put 4" oaks in the 95 gallon pots - but by the time we were ready to plant, we just had bigger trees. Yep, you do the math as to how long it took us to get in gear . . .

. . . in reality, we like to sell our shade trees at no bigger than 4". They're somewhere between 14 and 18 feet tall then and a lot of plant to handle. A 5 or 6 inch tree will transplant better with a bigger rootball than the 24" RootMaker bags they're growing in.

At the left are some Southern Live Oaks that are being cured. We can keep them on the yard for months and months like this, if needed.

Here's a close-up of the in-ground container we use. The material it's made of prunes the trees roots. In a plastic pot, roots hit the side of the pot, turn and begin circling. We don't have that problem with this process. I mean, just look at the number of small fibrous roots - when this tree is transplanted, the root system should really take off - well, provided it is given lots of water - but that's altogether another subject.