 I've been doing trees here for close to 40 years now, hard to believe, but as she said I've planted in my lifetime probably 30 to 40,000 trees and what I find really cool about that is every time I plant a tree I think, wow, this can be here long after I'm gone. This is my legacy and I tell my kids, I'm not leaving you any money to look around because there's plenty of trees out there. There's a great quote by the British author George Orwell and I'll paraphrase it. It says, the planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood species, is a gift that you can make to posterity and at almost no cost and with almost no effort and if it should take root it'll far outlast any of the result of any of your actions good or evil. So that's a nice thought, but unfortunately far too often people plant trees and they make critical mistakes along the way and the trees never even come close to reaching maturity and I've seen these mistakes over the years and I'm going to try to go through and talk about those problems and what we can do about them because this is a tree for posterity. This is not far from my property in Charlotte. This tree was probably a sapling when there were battles, gunship battles being fought in the Revolutionary War on Lake Champlain, but then in the worst cases we do stuff like that and that and these are not trees for posterity. Nice try. And then we love our trees so much that every year we pile mulch on them to the point where we're slowly killing them. So if we're going to think about how to plant trees for posterity, what do trees need? What do they have in their natural environment? So if you go out in the woods, what do you see? Typically within a very small area you can see a wide diversity of species dependent on the terrain where you might have a low lying spot with poor drainage. You're going to find a different species and you're going to find on a high rocky hillside. They each find their niche based on soil types, based on the microclimates and you have this constant cycling of nutrients. Leaves and debris falling down every year, rotting into the soil, a really rich, rich environment there. Well aerated, holds a lot of moisture. Awesome environment for microorganisms, beneficial mycorrhizal fungal relationships between the tree roots and the fungus that are beneficial to the trees. This is what trees want, okay? And at the base of every tree, this is what you see. A very pronounced root flare. These are the buttress roots and it's not just one tree, it's every tree. And if you've ever seen a large tree uprooted, it can have some larger tap roots that go deep, but the vast majority of the tree roots that are feeding, that are uptaking water and nutrients are in that top profile of soil. And the reason being is the aeration. Tree roots need oxygen. So it all starts with choosing the right tree for the right place. Somebody didn't look up here when they planted this tree. And this is really typical. So when we plant a tree, there's a lot of considerations on your site. So if you're a homeowner and you do any amount of gardening, you probably have a sense of what your soils are like. And how do you tell how well drained your soils are? Are they sandy soils? Are they clay soils? A lot of that can be done simply by smell, believe it or not, and by feel. So a very sandy soil that's not rich in nutrients, it's going to be really well drained, not going to retain a lot of water, going to tend to dry out, is going to feel gritty, like sand on a beach. A really heavy clay soil, if you're to dig a hole, you're probably, especially in the spring, going to smell almost a septic-y kind of rotting smell. That's from anaerobic conditions. Saturation of the soil. You might see some modeling in the soil, like some gray modeling. And if you take that soil and you wet it a little bit, you can press it between your finger and your thumb and make sort of a ribbon with it. Clay soils can be really good for some trees, but they hold a lot more water. But, you know, in heavy rain years, they can be slow to drain. They hold a lot of nutrients. So you have to evaluate your soils. And then you've got to think about, and this is a common mistake that I see all the time, is people don't think about how big the trees are ultimately going to get. And I see this a lot, especially with people wanting to plant a little home orchard. So they'll go out and buy a half a dozen fruit trees, and they're tiny little things with a little bit of branching, and they'll plant them six feet apart. Well, what happens ten years down the road? They're all growing into each other. There's no air circulation. There's not good light penetration, and it's a lost cause. But, you know, I took a picture of this landscape. This is in Shelburne at a retirement community. But maybe the objective here was to create a forest. I don't know. But in the foreground here, or right here, is an oak tree, like the one you saw in the first photograph. And right next to it is a pine, and right behind it is a spruce here and a maple. And what do you think that's going to look like in 20 years? These trees are going to start to shade each other out. In people's home landscapes, you really got to think about, you know, if you're planting a flowering tree, a flowering tree wants full sunlight, eight hours a day. Well, how about all the trees surrounding your property or other trees on your property? How are they going to interact with that tree five, 10, 15, and 20 years down the road? So that's really something to think about. You have to think about, of course, parking as zones. We're here in the Champlain Valley, much warmer than different parts of the state. And as the climate is changing, we're finding that we're starting to plant some species that maybe we wouldn't have planted 20 years ago. But you have to think about low soil temperatures. Overall space and soil volume is a big one. This is a challenge as a city arborist in Burlington that we come up against all the time. We're planting trees that will ultimately get quite large in a very narrow strip between the sidewalk and the road. And so the tree is limited by the amount of soil volume that it has for its roots to continue to grow out and expand in the surrounding soil. So sometimes it may be wise if you're on a new property to take a soil test. Soil tests can tell you a lot. A lot of soil tests will give you sort of a breakdown of your soil type, sandy loam, clay loam. But more importantly, they'll talk about, and I won't go into detail on the science here, but they'll talk about organic matter, overall fertility, and your major macro and micronutrients. Nitrogen phosphorus, available phosphorus, potassium, important nutrients. Most soil, native soils undisturbed on sites around the state have everything a tree needs. I've done a lot of soil tests over the years in my previous job, and it was rare to find things that were really, really efficient. But if you're on a new site, a new home site where they came in, you see some of these new developments, what's the first thing they do? They bulldoze off all the topsoil, right? Then they dig these foundations and they go down six and eight feet and they take all that fill and they spread it over the area and they drive over it for months and months with heavy equipment. And then when the houses are built, they come in and put three inches of topsoil over top of that. So what you have there is very different, and it may take some amending. A lot of different, several different ways that you can typically purchase trees at your local garden center. Baldenbrillab trees. Baldenbrillab trees are grown in a nursery for several years from a small sapling or whip grown on for several years and then typically dug with a hydraulic tree spade. A hydraulic machine that has three blades goes down, cuts roots, lifts it up and the tree is placed in these wire baskets and then shipped to the garden centers. The nice thing about this is you've got a tree coming with soil on the roots so it doesn't dry out as quickly. But even a tree of this size that maybe was only in a nursery for three or four years growing in a nursery, when this digging process takes place, as much as 75 to 85% of the existing root system is left in the field and is severed from the tree. So you're losing a lot of root system. These can be very successful despite that because trees are resilient and they will recover over time and recover that root-to-shoot ratio. So what happens is when you remove that much of the root system in a given year, for the next couple of years there's sort of a saying in the business that for every inch of caliber, inch of diameter of the trunk, it's going to take one year to recover before you're going to start seeing significant growth. Because trees grow, the top of the tree grows in direct proportion to the root system it has to support it. Trees don't put out more shoots, more new leaves than they have roots to support so when you cut up, cut those off, the tree will adjust over time. Disadvantage of this tree for the average homeowner is that this root ball here, which is about 28 inches in diameter, could probably weigh upwards of 250 to 300 pounds. So it might require specialized equipment or you have to hire somebody to plant it, but you can ultimately get a bigger tree to start with. General rule of thumb if you're going to buy a Baldenberg lap tree, one inch, a minimum of one inch of root ball diameter per inch of caliber. So if this was a two and a half inch tree, no less than 24 inches of root ball diameter. And I say this because I've seen trees in garden centers with root balls that were way too small. Remember back, we're removing 75 to 80 percent of the root system. So you want to make sure you're getting a bigger root ball as you should be. That root ball, that trunk of the tree should be centered in the root ball and when you move the trunk a little bit, it shouldn't be wobbling in there. The burlap shouldn't be torn up. You know, what the top of the tree looks like is important, but what's below ground is equally important. So again, this is showing just the relative diameter of the root ball to the size of the tree here. The other way, typically a lot of homeowners buy small trees in containers in a garden center. This has a big advantage in that when you transplant that tree, you are taking the entire root system with it. You're not losing any. It's all contained in there. Typical homeowner can handle something like this. You know, they do sell trees in big, big containers, but you can get a decent size tree in a 15 or 20 gallon pot and it can do quite well. Again, you're looking for the tree to be centered in there. And if you were to pull the tree out of the pot at the garden center, this is what you should see. You might see some small fibrous roots around the edge of the pot, but you do not want to see large woody roots circling in there. This was at a garden center years ago, a Vermont garden center, where I just walked in and walked randomly up to some of their container-grown trees. And this is what I found. Can you see that? This is not a tree for posterity. This is a tree that's going to go on your brush pile in about two years. This has a girdling, what we call a girdling root, already encircling the tree and embedded in the base of it. And over time, what happens with that is as that tree, as a root grows in diameter, and the stem of that tree grows in diameter starts to compress, the vascular tissue of the tree essentially strangles it. And it is a chronic problem. This is what a tree like that would look like if you took it out of the container. And I tell people, if you're going to buy a tree in a container and you go to your local garden center, ask them to slide the tree out of the pot so you can look at the root system. And this has yet to come back and haunt me, but I know it's going to someday. Some garden center owner is going to say, hey, what are you telling people to slide the trees out? But what happens is these trees start in a smaller pot, get potted up, get root bound. They take them, they bump them up to a bigger container. So now you've got a spiraling root system within. And that container too long, a few roots grow out, do the same thing. And you've got concentric layers of these girdling roots. And these are hard, woody roots, like this diameter of my finger. And I have seen cases in my previous job where I went on clients' properties and they had small trees that they had bought in containers several years prior. They said to me, we planted these trees that we got at our local garden center and they really haven't done anything. And I'll walk up to them and I'll go like this with a stem and I can see a cracking in the mulch, perfect circle. And in one case I actually said to the lady, do you trust me, do you mind? And I pulled the tree right out of the ground. We've been there several years and had never rooted out into the surrounding soil. I was just trying to exist off that wound up root system. But my previous employer was Bartlett tree experts and they had a research lab in North Carolina that I went to visit several times. This was their solution to those root bound container grown trees. And it's really the only thing you can do is to go in there with an axe and cut those roots and free them up so that new roots, fibrous roots will form off the end of those cuts and expand out into the soil. But in my opinion you shouldn't go out and pay $150 for a tree and have to come home and take an axe to it. So something to avoid. And this is after he had done that and essentially bare rooted the tree, teased all those roots out and then planted it. This was a tree on their property where they had just taken that same type of container grown tree and stuck it in the ground and this was several years later and you can see what's happening here. So within a couple of years these roots are going to be up against the trunk of that tree as it continues to expand the phloem which is, if you remember your science class, asylum in the phloem. The phloem is the vascular tissue just inside that inner bark layer, thin layer of cells that translocates the photosynthetics, the products of photosynthesis back to feed the root system of the tree. So over time that gets compressed so you're essentially cutting off the root system of the tree. And I have literally thousands and thousands of photographs over the years of this condition on trees, on private properties, commercial properties, municipal properties. We see this problem in Burlington on trees that were planted on the streets 30 years ago when we didn't know at the time what we know now about planting. Another problem that I see very often, trees coming from nurseries that are planted too deep in the root ball. So this was a tree, I did some consulting work for the state of Vermont. If you are familiar with Morrisville a number of years ago, a bypass road was built around Morrisville. And over 700 trees were planted along that road and I oversaw the tree planting on that project. And this is a tree that came from a nursery and you can clearly see the soil line here. This is when we opened the root ball, we started digging down and looking for that natural root flare that we saw in those first pictures. And we weren't even quite there yet. And you can see that distance. And we'll talk about why that's an issue. And this is another tree from that same job. Felco pruners are eight and a quarter inches long if you were to measure them. You see the soil line up here. And this sort of swelling here is where the tree was grafted. That's the graft unit. And down here we're just starting to see the natural flare of the root system that it was grafted onto. Planting trees too deep will kill trees. Sometimes it happens really quickly. Sometimes it can take 10 or 15 years. This tree right here was one that I sold from a nursery operated for 22 years in Charlotte. And I sold it to a landscaper who took it along with about a dozen others to line a driveway in Charlotte. A private resident. Very heavy clay soil here. It was June of 2013 I guess because the date's on the photo. He came and got them in April. The trees were just starting to bud out. They were all healthy. And a few weeks later he called me and he said one of these trees is just petering out. I said I'm happy to come take a look at it. And when I got there this is what I found. You see what the base of this tree looks like? Looks like a pole going in the ground. Well it turns out we had had a really wet June or May that year. Heavy clay soil, he went in there with an excavator and dug holes, just plopped these trees in and this tree was planted way too deep. And what happened was the soil was so saturated that the groundwater was almost up to the surface and this tree suffocated. Because when the soil becomes totally saturated and it's a species that isn't acclimated to that type of soil, the root function will cease to exist because the oxygen level in the soil is below a threshold where root systems can continue to function. And as I said, sometimes this planting too deep of trees takes years before you see the problems. This was a guy who knew in Charlotte who called me on the 4th of July one year. This was a number of years ago and said I have this beautiful sugar maple that I planted 11 years ago on my front lawn and it's not looking good and I'm worried about it. Can you come and take a look? And so I said sure. So I went down the road and I got there and you'll notice this tree, it's not a great photograph, but pulling in the driveway, the two things I notice about this tree, discoloration in the top of the crown and look kind of thin in the base of the tree to me look like a telephone pole going in the ground. I started to excavate around it with a little claw tool. And this is what I found. These are girdling roots here, here and here embedded in the base of this tree and you can actually see a little swelling here. You see that on the sides? And that's because as that vascular tissue got compressed there was a backup essentially of the photosynthetics and the starches being stored there that caused that swelling. I called this guy up, he had gone to put his boat in the water and I said, your tree's a goner. And he said, what do you mean? I said, it has these girdling roots. You know, it's too late. I'm starting to see decline in the crown. He wouldn't believe it. He went back, I said, all you can try to do is cut those roots to free them and see if the tree will recover, but in my experience this tree is going to make it. And he called me the following year and said you were right, the tree didn't make it. But the interesting thing here was I explained to him that this tree got planted too deep. That natural root flare got buried and over time tree roots grew upward and started encircling the tree and I see this all the time. And he said to me, he said my son and I planted these trees. There was another one on the other side of the driveway. He said it took us the whole weekend. We got him from the local garden center. We dug holes. We, you know, we did everything right and we planted the top of that root ball even with the existing grade of the surrounding soil. What do you think the problem was? It came from the nursery already too deep in the root ball. So if you're not aware of that problem and you're planting a Baldenberg tree or even a container tree, they do the same thing. This is what happened. And I see this all the time. We're seeing it in Burlington now on trees that have been in the ground 25 years and now they're dying because they were planted too deep and it took that long for these girdling roots to develop. And by time you start to see the decline in the crown of the tree, game over. So if you're interested in planting trees the thing I tell you first is go look at the trees you have first and if you walk up to your trees and they look like a telephone pole and you're not yet seeing the decline in the crown of the tree check this out and there's ways to excavate and check this out. Another shot of the same tree you can clearly see those roots embedded here. I would say conservatively and when I'm out in the field and I'm looking at big commercial jobs, new buildings, where they go in and landscape even on private properties in recent years 70% of the trees I see are planted too deep with this root flare buried. So I've been giving this talk for a lot of years and I haven't changed it much because I keep seeing the same problems. So I'm going to keep talking about it just like your parents would hound you about the same things and tell you because people are educated about it. And a lot of landscapers out there that I've known for many years have this problem and they're aware of it and if they're out there doing the work themselves they will mitigate these problems but there's a lack of training and in a seasonal business where you hire people in the spring and a lot of landscapers will say oh I hired this great guy he's been working for so and so for this many years he has all the experience well he may not so I'm really going to drive this point home this is a property on the north end of Burlington it's a condo association way out off of Northab and in my previous job I was called here these are Princeton Elms a selection of American Elms lining the driveway and they were worried about the health of a number of these trees so I pulled in here and I don't know how well you can see this from the back of the room but the tree in the foreground nice full crown great color looking robust and if you look at the base of it right here you can see that root flare you can see those surface roots going out from the base there and that's what the rest of them look like they were planted at the same size on the same day and the same soil conditions received the same care and the only difference was some were planted too deep and that one was planted at the proper depth so a number of tree care companies around the area employed this technique this was partly tree experts who I worked for and this is an air spade so this is a specialized nozzle and it was actually developed my understanding is for military use to expose land mines where they take a compressor and they put high pressure air through it with a specialized nozzle and you can blow the soil away without entering roots so when we would go on to properties where there were these medium aged trees like this and if we suspected this girdling root problem was developing we could take this tool and blow the soil away without going in there and digging physically with tools and injuring that root system and we could expose that root system and see what was going on and it was crazy the stuff we found but it was fun also because I would tell the homeowner here's what's going on below the soil and I would explain this to him and then we committed I was a hero all doctor death on one occasion because these people's tree was completely shot this is one tree that we exposed here and you can clearly see this root but we were able to cut that root off because it was not yet embedded in that tree and we were able to save this tree and what will happen is you see right here this is a graft union of the tree this swelling this root flare on grafted trees the root flare is typically 2 to 3 inches below that graft union is where you're going to find that flare so obviously you can't excavate a ton of soil away from the tree but when trees are planted too deep they will develop roots above that natural root flare we call them adventitious roots and those can be problematic at this age you can remove them without doing harm to the tree and you can save it for the long term it's a birch similar situation you can see these roots going in every direction here no future for this tree if you don't get in there and mitigate this problem and here's another problem we see all the time there's people not removing these wire baskets so when you plant a bald and burlap tree they typically come in a pre-formed a wire basket it's a pretty heavy gauge galvanized steel I've excavated trees that were planted 25 and 30 years ago and this basket might be a little rusted but it does not break down that wire is still like the day you put it in so what happens over time is that these roots grow through these openings you can see here and imagine that root the root grows the root grows much like the trunk of the tree expands outward like this so over time that the wire is going to start to girdle portions of that root system I can't say for certain that it's going to kill the tree over time but remember back to when I told you that trees grow in proportion to the root system they don't put out any more shoes or branches than the root system and when a significant portion of the root system gets girdled and those roots beyond that girdling are no longer functioning you'll start to see some decline in the crown of the tree it's a simple process to remove that basket now I'm going to go through a simple process of planting a tree and I've done a lot of them this way and it's quite successful so this is a tree that came from my nursery years ago I planted it for a neighbor down the road from my house I thought she might be here today I'm glad she's not anyway she likes to talk a lot and so when she came out and watched me plant this tree I gave her a camera at the time and nobody was taking pictures on phones I gave her a camera and I said Laura every time I tell you I want you to snap a picture so I got a great sequence of pictures so if you plant a tree whether it's on your own property or somebody else's property or you're working with a community group and you're going to plant on public property first thing you want to do is call DigSafe toll free free service they notify all the utilities in the area within 48 hours they'll come out if you have the site marked they'll mark gas lines they won't run into any problems because when we plant trees in Burlington there's stuff underground everywhere so typical recommendation is to dig a hole that is two times or three times the diameter of the root ball now that's a good general rule but if you're planting in an area like this this was an open pasture area because it had been undisturbed for many many years so this was good native soil I could take a shovel and just right into the ground much different if you're on a new site with compacted soil you want that bigger hole this hole wasn't as large as I would normally dig but first thing I do is remove the sod so I cut the sod cut it into sections, skim it off just below that root system absolutely do not put the sod back in the planting hole with the tree and I find it's hard to chop it up and fill in those air pockets it kind of goes in and clumps so I take that set it aside you can compost it you can patch it on with it if you've got some divots in your lawn and then the next thing is to determine the depth of the hole that you want to dig so here's the standard root system and you remember what I said is sometimes these trees come planted too deep from the nursery so how deep am I going to dig the hole you've got to take a look inside the top of that root ball and determine where that root flare is well this tree is one that I grew myself in the nursery I was running at the time so I knew that root flare was right at the surface of the soil there so I just took a stake and I marked it it was going to be my depth but if you were to plant a bald and burlap tree or a container grown tree you get it next to the hole you remove soil from the top of that root ball like with a bald and burlap tree you can just take a utility knife cut that burlap away start excavating with a little tool find that root flare sometimes you might be removing 3, 4, 5, 6 inches of soil before you find it now the depth of your hole is going to be from the bottom of that root ball to wherever you determine that root flare being no reason to dig a hole any deeper if you dig a real deep hole and then you put soil back in over time it's going to settle in the tree you can either list to one side or the other or end up too deep so then I dug my hole and I put a flat rake you can use the stake across where did it fall in relation to my marker dig a little deeper here or dig a little deeper so then when I got that done I got the root ball next to the hole take a $12 pair of bolt cutters then I got it at the local hardware store and I caught this vertical wire right below the bottom horizontal wire on the root ball all the way around so you cut, cut, cut, cut tip the root ball over on the other side pull the bottom of the basket right off still holding together because I got that wire all around the sides so there's a bottom off then I typically cut the top in the bottom horizontal on one side of the tree leave the middle one tip the tree over do the same thing on the other side that tree is not coming apart get the tree in the hole probably require equipment or somebody younger than me than I am now but get it positioned in the hole in the center of the hole make sure you're straight from side to side then I go back and I cut that single wire on either side of the tree and that whole basket comes off and two pieces gone remove the burlap burlap on trees that you find in the garden center will rot away over time but it is treated with a chemical that will keep it there for a while so any barrier between that root ball and the existing soil that's going to inhibit quick new root growth out into the surrounding soil get rid of it very simple I take I typically use to take our kitchen scissors and I cut this off then I start to backfill I like when I plant a tree to put a tarp off to the side put all my soil on the tarp put my sod on the tarp no mess shovel it back in so I'm going all around the tree and I fill in about a third of the way up and then I take my shovel and I'm removing those air pockets making sure it's settled might do a little light tamping with my feet some major rocks that I find again some light tamping you're not stomping it and then mulch mulch is a good thing for trees if you think back to what I said at the beginning trees in their natural environment there's a natural mulch every year and silly us every year when the leaves come down what do we do we rake them all up we carve them away what we really ought to be doing is mulching I'm going to put them back around the trees because that's what they want mulch retains moisture reduces weed competition keeps soil temperatures cooler better environment for new rooting but it can be too much of a good thing I recommend two to three inches of mulch around the surface and never up against the trunk of the tree if you look close here you can still see the root flare here so we keep it away from the base of the trunk of the tree and we only put two to three inches and that's not two to three inches every year after year after year and let it build up there's no reason to continue to put mulch on trees maybe every couple of years you put a thin layer then you want to water best way to water trees is put your hose in a five gallon pail turn it on on a trickle and see how long it takes to fill up so you have an idea of how many minutes it takes put x number of gallons of water on the tree put your hose at the base of the tree that's not what I did here but turn it on a trickle and let it go slowly so it's a slow seeping into the soil the other great mechanism are these watering bags they zip up around the tree they typically hold 20 gallons of water they have little pinholes in the bottom you fill them once a week you're putting 20 gallons of water on the tree and it's going right where you want it people go out with a hose and they're just like shhh and they think they're putting a ton of water on their tree and most of it's running off and outside of the root zone of that tree and it's not doing any good and you know you can over water too keep in mind what kind of soils you have on a sandier soil it's going to drain more quickly dry out more quickly you're going to be watering more frequently so there's a little common sense in there clay soils are going to retain the moisture a lot longer staking trees should we stake trees I rarely stake Baldenberg left trees that I plant so long as the root the tree is solid in that root ball a lot of studies have shown that the movement of a tree after you plant it from the wind just that movement is actually stimulating new root growth and stimulating cell growth so the trunk of the tree grows in diameter if you go down to the lake or out to an exposed site and you look at big larger trees on the prevailing wind side of the trees like along the lake on the lake side of the trees root flare on that side of the tree because from that constant wind blowing the root system on that side of the tree builds up to anchor the tree if you are going to stake your trees in the young trees that we plant in Burlington we do stake them we use two hardwood stakes about 18-24 inches out from the sides of the tree on either side pound them in 8-10 inches or 17 gauge wire that you can get at your local hardware store and we run these nylon straps around the trunk of the tree just around one side not wrapping it completely around and they have grommets you run the wire through the grommets back to the post and you tighten it up you don't have to get it tight tight because again you want some movement there but if you don't have those straps you can use a piece of hose to make sure that the hose is actually protecting the trunk of the tree and typically after one growing season that tree if it was well cared for should have rooted in really well and you can remove the wires people leave them on and this is what happens and not good mulch this is what we don't want to do with our trees I'll take my word for it you're going to see this all over Chittenden County there's companies that make their living off of slowly killing trees they go in every year with truckload to mulch and this is what they do, they pile it on this is right on Route 7 in Shelburne years ago I was so disturbed by what I was seeing here that I went out and I made my little mulch meter I took a yard stick and I made the sliding thing on it and it's hard to tell there but that is 13 inches right there so about 14 inches of mulch above the surface this is no different than planting the tree too deep tissue, trunk tissue is much different than the bark on the trunk of the tree is much different than the surface of what's covering your roots and so over time this is going to start rotting the bark rotting the tree, get fungus problems in there a lot of fibrous roots whoops, a lot of fibrous roots will grow up into this mulch and actually make it more prone to drought over time so the one other thing I'll say is success comes in planting a tree from the time you pick it up at the garden center to actually get it in the ground and I see people all the time in the spring they get all excited about their plants they go to the garden center on a Saturday and you're shaking your head you've done this I did that with my quinks you buy a plant, you buy a tree you come home it's late in the day I gotta be at dinner at my neighbor's house and you leave it off to the side the next day something comes up you're laughing back there you've done that as well and it sits on the side of your driveway and the pavement is there and the temperature gets up to 110 on the pavement the tree is drying out and it's dying so you gotta take care of that tree from the time you leave the garden center until you get it in the ground so if we pick the right tree for the right place we follow these general guidelines of proper planting proper planting depth is key you don't over mulch you don't do this you gotta water that tree religiously throughout its establishment period so for larger trees like the 2 inch balden burlap tree that could be 2 or 3 growing seasons if it looks good at the end of the first season in the following year you have a severe drought all those new roots that grew out into the soil can be really prone to dying so long term care and if we do all that hopefully we're planting trees for posterity they're gonna be there long after we're done so a couple years ago I did a video on Arbor Day at the University of Vermont where we planted a bare root tree and the guys sat there and videotaped me so if you want a little tutorial on planting bare root trees where I talk about a lot of these same issues which can really see the root system of the tree it's a great little entertaining video and that was my son who's now 22 so I took this photo a long time ago this was in my backyard so if you have any questions that's a crash course in tree planting all good? I have a question what kind of mulch do you need here? what kind of mulch? there was actually a woman out in Washington state who did an extensive study on different types of mulch haplock mulch versus ground pine bark versus leaves composted leaves just wood chips straight out of the wood chipper and she found that the wood chips straight out of the wood chipper are just as good as anything else at my own house for several years what I've been doing is in the fall when I rake up my leaves I kind of get them in sort of a pile I set my lawnmower up really high and I go over them 2-3 times kind of chop them up and then I rake them in to the rings around my tree isn't that what they want? maple trees out on the side of the mountain are not growing with ground hemlock bark around the base of them right? you're growing with decaying sugar maple leaves so there's something to be said about that so I went to a conference a number of years ago and this guy did a whole talk about leave the leaves that's why they call them leaves leave them there and it's crazy in Burlington the city picks up people's bagged leaves and it's just nuts in a perfect world I would recommend mulched area of natural decaying stuff out to the drip line of the tree of course you wouldn't have any lawn but it'd be less mowing but that's what the tree really wants so over time my trees on my own property I expand that a little every year they're not out to the drip lines but that's look to nature nature's got it right we've messed things up anybody else? if you are putting wood chips or if I were to put wood chips around the base of the tree would there be a problem growing mushrooms in there? like wine caps, gangster veria? no you want to grow them in there? oh yeah very tasty mushrooms, they're easy to grow but they grow on wood chips cool the only thing I would say is you can run into problems with supposedly and it wouldn't be very common but there are certain tree species that the chemicals in the wood of the tree can have what's called a leelopathic effect so over time as they break down they actually have a growth regulating like black walnuts like black walnuts would be a good example willows, some certain willows can have that effect but I mean it'd be odd for you to get a load of wood chips that was all black walnuts well I have wood of property and there are places that I'm trying to take away some of the things that previous owner had grown so making wood chips out of that I don't think we have any black walnuts yep anything else? we probably did really well on time yes sir so in one of the other lectures today speaker was recommending against sowing the leaves because he or she had no idea which speaker it was felt that that was destroying the habitats for the insects insect larvae and stuff so which is which is what we do so I think that's a good point excuse me I think it depends if you did it as soon as the leaves come down you're probably okay later in the season things are starting to pupate or go into that decomposing material you know I typically do it right off when the leaves come down I go out there and mow a little bit it just helps them break down faster we good? are we on time? thank you