Boy it has been a busy month! It felt like the winter would never end so I could plant my trees. But here we are and the activities over the last few weeks have been crazy!!
I originally wanted to take you through the process of planting as we went along, but alas that did not happen. So, let’s rewind a couple of weeks and start from the beginning………
If you have been following my previous posts, we left off after drilling holes and adding lime to the soil as we filled them back in. After a few good rains we noticed that the soil within the holes had settled and we needed to add a bit more to bring it back to the top. We had some nice black dirt piled up from when we cleared the land, so we put this to good use.
So now we are ready to plant!
When we pre-drilled and filled our holes in previously, we planted a flag in the center of each one. This helped greatly in making sure we were planting in the actual hole. These are terribly hard to find later if you don’t!
Using either a hand rake or small shovel, we dug holes about 6 inches down and quite a bit larger than the trees we planted.
Next we added no more than 1/2 tsp of dry water crystals. This is very important due to the properties of the crystals.
I like to mix them into the dirt a bit prior to adding my tree, just to make sure you don’t end up with a bunch of crystals all together. The picture to the right shows them prior to mixing them into the soil.
The water crystals are added to help hold water near the roots of the plant so it doesn’t dry out so quickly during our hot Alabama summers.
Next we add our tree and any extra dirt needed to keep them at ground level.
With the tree firmly in the ground, we added about 1/2 cup of controlled release fertilizer in a 10 to 12 inch circle around the tree.
Lastly, we topped everything with our 18 x 18 pre-cut weed mats and secured them with rocks or landscape staples.
Once we had a routine established and a designated job for everyone, we were ready to plant our 750 baby Paulwonia trees. YES, you read that right. Over a 3 day period we planted 750 trees. This is definitely a labor of love and I can’t wait to update you on how well they are growing.
If you missed the previous blog posts, feel free to go back and start at the bottom of the page to get started.
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