Root Balls

I read somewhere that when you plant a (bare root) tree that you should use the same soil that came out of the hole to fill it . The reasoning was that if you use nice soil when the roots hit the edge of the hole they would treat it as if it were a planter/pot and just fill the "good soil" with roots until it is root bound . I'm wondering if the same principle applies to the veggies I've grown here . I dig a hole a good bit larger than the root ball/soil in the small pots I use for seedlings and fill it with a mixture of manure and soil from the hole when I transplant . We don't have much topsoil here , and in my inexperience when I first started my garden I think I let a lot of it wash away (the garden is on a slope) . I'm amending that now by tilling straw into the soil after using it as a thick mulch to retard runoff and keep weeds down . But the soil is still mostly in pretty poor condition so I still dig the holes and fill with an "enriched" mixture . I just got to wondering , thinking back on the size of the root balls in past years . Seems like they never get any bigger than the otiginal hole ... -- Snag

Reply to
Terry Coombs
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it depends a lot upon the plant/species as to how far the roots may go.

i usually plant the tomato plants in a fairly small but deep hole, but by the time the summer is over i cannot usually pull the plants out by hand. most the time i just cut them off and leave the roots in the soil to rot in place.

onions on the other hand, the roots don't go much beyond six to eight inches. beans look to go about a foot and a half. some i can pull out by hand and others i can't.

remember, the soil community can be much larger than the plant root itself, tilling can destroy it. i try to avoid digging as much as possible, but do it when i have good reasons (burying organic materials is one of them).

for any bare soil spaces that are on a slope i would terrace them or make ridges to prevent my nutrients from escaping. the ridges can be planted with alfalfa or other green manure sources and they can also act as a refuge for friendly garden bugs like the ladybug. you'll also find worms in there around those roots as the plants get established.

straw is better than nothing. yet if you can find other things to mulch with that will improve your soil more. chopped alfalfa (right as it is blooming) is great, plus birdsfoot trefoil and clovers are the three biggies that grow well for me in the green manure patch.

rabbit nerds are also excellent, whatever else you can scrounge for organic materials is usually a great help as long as it doesn't come from a feedlot where drugs are used.

any composted food scraps. keep a worm farm and use the worms/pee/poo under your heavy feeding plants.

also, growing cover crops during the off season will help. winter rye and winter wheat turned under in the spring, cowpeas, hairy vetch, ...

if you have room for growing any nitrogen fixing trees you can also chop some of those leaves for using as mulches.

my other main amendment is partially decayed wood chips. turns into excellent humus and brings along a whole range of fungal hyphae.

i've been amending patches around the garden and you can see the gradual improvement over the years, but when you have a large space and not much to amend with each season it can take several seasons for much to be obvious.

like one garden i am getting into shape that we combined with another last year will probably take two or three more years just to get some kind of worm populations established.

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notice the last picture in that... the garden that used to be very poor throughout and had that poor soil is probably a few shades darker now as i've kept adding my garden scraps, organic materials like leaves and twigs, the partially decayed wood chips, etc.

also:

rotational planting stretches any amending (different plant groups use different soil nutrient profiles). most of the patches will not be amended each season other than the burying of whatever is grown there (which disturbs 1/10th or less of most garden patches).

Ma is not into leaving mulches on the soil so that does defeat some of my gains, but even still the garden soils are gradually improving. a cover crop of radishes, buckwheat or turnips are fairly quick but very helpful. any time you can harvest sunlight and turn that into plant materials or exhudates given off by roots for your soil community to eventually digest it is a big gain.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Once again it sometimes works that way and then it doesn't. Our "soil" is two inches of sand on top of five feet of Houston gumbo clay. The hole I had dug to plant the pear tree ended up being eight feet deep and six feet wide. Hired a crew to do the digging and then they stayed to help me seat the six foot tall pear. We used a lot of expensive soil that was heavily amended. Put enough in the hole and then soaked it, then put more amended soil and watered again. Took three tries to get it above grade then planted the pear tree. The first year we got a few pears, the second year we got two bushels. I'm waiting for spring to see what the third year brings us.

The kumquat tree was planted into the clay layer about two feet, it still hasn't grown much since it was planted. As soon as spring leaps up I intend to use an auger and drill holes around the perimeter of the tree and then amend those holes with citrus fertilizer and some "real" soil, mostly the compost we've been making. This is in hopes the tree will grow bigger.

Straw isn't the best thing to use to build soil as, in my opinion, it takes a longer time to rot and turn into humus. You're probably going to have to keep up the amending for a goodly amount of time Snag. It takes a lot of humus to finally get good soil. If you want to keep using straw I would chop it very small to help rot quicker.

We lived in Saudi Arabia for several years and our yard was pure sand. We mixed in a lot of camel and donkey poop that was well rotted and actually bought bags of dirt. After about a year of amending the beds they become good dirt and our plants and gardens did well.

It's all about amending, amending, and then more amending. Our gardens in Saudi were amended every week when we pot holed all the vegetable trash that was going into the composter we made.

George, in chilly SE Texas

Reply to
George Shirley

songbird wrote: ...

this is live now so the link has changed to:

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songbird (about time!

Reply to
songbird

When I was a small boy I used to go in the summer to stay at my Aunt's place and her son and myself would go into the woods and poke around under rotting logs for earthworms. That was my first and last time to ever see such large worms. Big around as a pencil and about 12 inches long. Very good fish bait in the nearby river and you only needed a few.

You jogged a very old memory songbird, thank you for that. My aunt, my Mother's elder sister, her husband, my Dad's younger brother, lived about a half mile from the river so it was easy to go out and get a mess of fish PDQ.

It's warm again here in SE Texas and I'm really ticked off. Went off to get handicap plates at a courthouse annex that no longer exists, even if the county's webpage says it's there. That location is now a large airport. Damned shame the county can't remove things from their website. Now I find I can mail it.

George

Reply to
George Shirley

George Shirley wrote: ...

i wonder if they were what we call night crawlers up around here. they do get to that size or larger.

there weren't many around in our yard when i first started gardening, but i do find them now after i let some go into the gardens. they've seemed happy enough here to keep making more. they do like soil with at least a little clay in it for building their burrows.

yw. i have fond memories of fishing various places but by far the best were when i was up north and able to walk those streams/rivers.

it seems that with handicap plates they'd make it easier for people to get them.

the only time i go to the secretary of state office here is when i need a new driver's license or new plates. the rest of the time it all gets done on-line and they send the tags in the mail. we're fairly lucky that so far they have not removed our local small town branch.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Here in Texas and next door in Louisiana drivers licenses are pretty much good forever or until you're gone. Plates last a long time but car inspections are every year and you get another sticker and they're on the windshield. Luckily we have an inspection place half a mile from the house and they also do car washes. We drive one car over and one follows, then they call us and we go back and pick the other one back. We get the sticker, a car wash, mine was a $90 detail as the car is covered with dog hair and old man hair and both are hard to get off of things. I might do that about every three or four years thoughl

Reply to
George Shirley

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