Planting a Fruit Tree

It is very important to plant your fruit trees correctly. The soil here at Eldorado Windy Farm is caliche for about a foot with red clay under that. Unless it has just rained you cannot use a shovel or a spade to penetrate the soil. The hole must be dug with a pick axe.

The hole is dug to the depth of the root ball in the container. You don't want the soil to be above the line where the stem meet the roots. (On trees that have been grafted to the root stock this point is easy to acertain.) The amount of soil that is dug from the hole is about three times the volume of the root ball. Since our soil is so poor in humus a bag of Soil Mender Plus is mixed with the soil that came out of the hole along with about a pint of Yum Yum Mix.

The container is removed from the tree taking care not to disturb the root ball and is set down into the hole remembering to not cover the point where the stem meets the roots. The mixed soil is replaced around the root ball and a ring of soil is built up about a foot around the trunk of the tree. The finished planting has the tree in the middle of a depression with a mound of soil around it for collecting the water. (As the tree grows I extend the ring of soil around the tree to match the tree's "drip line.")

The last step is to put water in the depression until it no longer seeps down to the roots.

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A helpful video is provided by Gordon Tooley of Tooley's Trees on YouTube. He however, plants in an area where the soil is much richer than mine.