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Ruth Stout , here I come
George Shirley wrote:
On 1/19/2016 9:28 AM, Terry Coombs wrote: Fruit trees - mine have been in the ground for 1 and 2 years , they aren't doing so well. Suggestions for a fertilizer that's eco-friendly ? These have never had anything but a little fish emulsion last summer , and I'd like to see them grow more , they haven't gottan any bigger since they were planted what kind of fruit trees? are they on grafted rootstock? how were they planted? how much light do they get? how much water? soil conditions? We have the same problem, a kumquat and a fig tree in the backyard. We had to dig holes in the gumbo clay and I'm afraid we didn't dig the holes wide enough or deep enough. The trees are growing very slowly but are still producing a decent crop of fruit. We usually add a little composted cow manure every few months and that helps. At our former home we had very deep loam soil from eons of tree leaves falling on what had, a long time ago, been a sand dune (think ancient bottom of the Gulf of Mexico). Fruit trees shot up like they were on steroids there. I miss that soil and am willing to bet that under that five feet of clay in the back there is another ancient sea bed that would have done the job. Albeit that the clay was laid down to keep us from having to pay for gubmint flood insurance. I'm thinking of devising something that I could drive down around the trees to penetrate the clay some more and then add fertilizer of some sort to help the roots spread wider and deeper. i've seen various methods for planting fruit trees in difficult conditions (read Sepp Holzer's works sometime ). once the tree is already in i suppose you could go back and gently dig down close to the tree to find the roots and then trench outwards through the clay and then fill that trench in with better quality soil. (it would look like an asterisk or the spokes of a wheel). the roots will follow that trench outwards. you'll have to keep topping it off as the organic material decays, but it should help as long as the slope is not towards the tree (it should be level -- clay will eventually soak up any extra water in there). in the future the much easier method is to just make a pile of the best soil you can including plenty of good organic materials and plant into that without doing much digging. the tree will do much better and you can keep adding organic materials around the tree as the pile breaks down. no trenching or digging needed. especially in a small area where you're putting in miniature trees. this way you avoid water logging issues too and the tree roots will eventually find their way down into the clay as needed (via worm holes ). songbird |
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