Successful Spring Planting Tips

Aaron Hoot from Davey's Dallas office shares spring planting tips to help kick off the spring, including the best native species to plant in his region as well as fertilization and watering tips.

In this episode we cover:  

• How to become successful at spring tree planting (:44)
• Aaron's favorite native species to plant (1:25)
• Planting season in Dallas (3:47)
• Watering during droughts (5:44)
• Mistletoe on trees (6:55)
• Hackberry trees (9:14)
• Spring fertilization (12:13)
• Wrapping newly planted trees (15:37)
• Planting mature or younger trees (16:49)
• Soils used in North Texas (18:51)
• Cutting container tree roots (21:49)
• Best tree watering practices (26:07)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more spring planting tips, read our blogs, Spring Ahead and Most Common Questions about Tree Care in Spring.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
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Facebook: @DaveyTree
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LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. I'm joined again by Aaron Hoot. He is an assistant district manager in Dallas for the Davie Tree Expert Company. Aaron suggested a great topic, planting for success when selecting what species of trees to plant in the landscape. Aaron, how are you doing?

Aaron: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Doug: All right. What are you thinking? How do I become successful?

Aaron: Like you said, the first step really is when you pick what you're going to plant. The plants that are going to do the best in your landscape are going to be the plants that are native to your area. They're going to be plants that understand what kind of a climate they're going to be growing in because it's the same climate they've been growing in for generations and for decades and sometimes hundreds of years. They're going to be a lot lower maintenance. They're not going to have as much trouble with your droughts or your freezes or your rainy seasons or your storms.

In the same time, that's going to mean they're not going to stress out and fall victim to fungal infections spreading or attracting insects from that stress.

Doug: In your area, what are some of your favorite natives to recommend?

Aaron: My go-to, live oaks are the go-to is because they're virtually bulletproof. They're just so hardy. They're evergreen, which most people love. Their ability to seal wounds and replace tissue is insane. If they do suffer a freeze crack or southwest injury or something like that or sap sucker damage, they can almost always recover from it whereas a lot of trees can't recover from those types of large tissue wounds. Like I said, they don't have any normal or constant issues really that they're prone to. They can have oak wilt like all oaks and it can be devastating with them but that's not specific to their species. It's something that is more specific to oaks in an area where it's bad.

Down in Central Texas, there's a lot of it. Up in Dallas, we don't have very much of it at this time. Unless the beetle transfers it up here, we're not going to have too much trouble. There is some up here. My second would be cedar elms. Cedar elms are great trees as well. They're really good at filling the space they have. If you have two neighbor's trees encroaching on the sides of your front yard and you need a tree that will grow straight and up quickly, that's a great tree for that. If you have a big wide open space, it'll spread nice and wide. Again, they don't freak out. They don't have a lot of health issues. They're not prone to stressing out.

Really, their biggest issue is mistletoe, which is pretty easy to circumvent once you keep an eye on it. Burr oaks and chinkapin oaks are also fantastic. They're not as commonly known about, at least in this area but they're really good trees. They're gorgeous trees. They have really nice, interesting leaves. The burr oaks have golf ball-sized acorns, which is a deterrent for a lot of people but they're really nice trees as well. Again, fairly stress resistant and they don't freak out very much about stuff as well.

Doug: Golf ball-sized acorns? I think that's a plus, unless I have to walk on them. That sounds really cool to me.

Aaron: Yes, they're not good if you're trying to walk on them but they're pretty fun.

Doug: When does your planting season begin?

Aaron: Ideally, our planting season begins at the beginning of winter. I would say late fall but we don't have much of a fall. It amounts to being more of a couple of weeks. Then I prefer not to plant past the very beginning of spring, if not, again, late winter. It's because it's a lot to ask a tree to establish roots during a drought. Whereas most places, fall and spring are ideal, in Texas, early winter and late winter are more what you want. Preferably early winter or late fall because the roots will keep growing while the tree is dormant and they'll establish through the cold season and while it's dormant, it's not going to get messed up by a freeze. Then by the time summer comes around, it'll be established.

It'll be in its space well enough to deal with the drought.

Doug: Is drought just the way it is in Texas? That's just the way it's going to be in the summer?

Aaron: When you have 20 to 30 hundred degree-plus days in a row pretty much every year, flanked on both sides by one to two months of mid to high 90s, you're in a drought every year. It just depends on how much of a drought. Is it a small drought or is it a large drought?

Doug: Aaron, how do you work in those temperatures? Do you just get used to it?

Aaron: Yes. A lot of hydration, obviously. The more you've done it, the more you acclimatize to it, the more you don't really notice it. Most of my guys prefer the heat to the cold. They'll take 100 degrees over 30 degrees any day. The guys that I have that have been doing it the longest, they'll call me and ask if they can work longer some days to put in a 12-hour day when it's 100 degrees out, which sometimes we let them do, sometimes we don't. We've got to keep an eye on them. You just become accustomed to it.

Doug: Are you doing a lot of watering on trees or when they're a native tree they're on their own?

Aaron: Supplemental watering is good when you're in a drought, depending on what you can get away with. Native trees like live oaks and cedar elms and stuff like that really don't need much. Extra helps but they're not going to, in most cases, have a severe issue unless there's another outstanding issue like a set of girdling roots or something like that. Something that's impeding the uptake of what water they do have. It always cracks me up when I go into certain areas that are very water friendly, if you will, and I see a bubbler at the base of a 70-year-old live oak. It makes me giggle because I don't really know what they think they're accomplishing with that.

That tree will be fine without the bubbler at the base of it. Just not long ago, I saw a picture of a live oak that had been completely severed through the vascular tissue all the way around the trunk and the canopy was still surviving. I'm not sure how long it survived that way but that means it could survive just off moisture in the air for at least a certain amount of time.

Doug: One thing I meant to ask you about and you told me about it before, but remind me about mistletoe, what that is and how that's a problem for you guys down there.

Aaron: Mistletoe, it's a parasitic plant. I always wonder how it became such a Christmas icon. If you imagine the way a tree roots into the ground, that's how mistletoe roots into a tree. It puts roots in through the bark and into the vascular tissue and it just sits there taking any water or nutrients that pass by, it takes some of it. It's spread by birds because birds will eat the berries that it produces and then fly somewhere and deposit those berries, if you will.

Those birds tend to prefer a couple different types of trees so those trees tend to be the most common to have it. Hackberries, cedar elms and bodarks are the most common to see it in but I've seen it on a Japanese maple. Pretty much anywhere that bird deposits that seed, again, if you will, it can germinate and root into the tree. There's not a lot of effective ways of deterring it other than removing the branch it's on. If you scrape it off, it's probably going to grow back. It's just like when you cut a plant to the ground, a lot of hardy plants, they'll grow right back. The roots are still there and alive. The idea is to remove infected branches, remove the seed source from the tree.

It's when it gets into a trunk or a structural main branch that you have to keep scraping it. Some people have found some success with wrapping it with black fabric or plastic to starve it of sunlight in hopes that that'll kill it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Some people go the route of fruit regulators, which is at least an attempt to control the seed source in the tree. If you treat the mistletoe at the right time of year, prevent it from going to seed then that lessens the amount of seeds around to be spread.

Doug: I assume during the holidays, if anyone's hanging mistletoe, you just pull it right down and throw it in the trash and get mad.

Aaron: Oh, no. I do my mistletoe pruning and then I go to the vendor's market and sell it.

Doug: That's a good idea. Give me a couple other ideas about being successful when I'm planting early in the season. Oh, before we go there, tell me about hackberries. I don't know anything about hackberry tree.

Aaron: Hackberry trees are, in most people's mind, what they call a trash tree. What it really boils down to, what a trash tree is something you didn't want right there and something that isn't growing the way you want it to grow. Nobody plants them on purpose at least not in our area. They're all spread by birds the same way I was talking about mistletoe. A bird eats a berry, goes and sits on the edge of your roof or on your fence and deposits that berry and that's where the tree grows. That's not where most people want a tree, is right up against their house or right up against the fence.

They are thought to be prone to breaking and dropping limbs but that's actually because of mistletoe and a lack of structural pruning. Trees that we buy from a nursery have been pruned to remove structural defects like codominance and things like that so that the trunk is not likely to snap or large branches are not likely to break off. A tree that grows naturally is not pruned like that. It is prone to having these structures that fail. The wood is actually very strong. The tree is actually very resistant. It's great firewood because it burns incredibly hot.

I have a customer who has a hackberry that stands right next to her house and her house is burned down twice and both times the side of the tree caught fire. If you get up close to it, you can see scars along all the branches but if you're standing at the street, it has a perfect canopy, it looks healthy, you would never imagine anything had happened to it. They're very, very resilient and resistant trees to fungus and insects but most people don't like them. They're not planted on purpose. They're not pretty in most people's opinions. They're just there. Most people don't like them.

Doug: As an arborist, how do you feel about the tree?

Aaron: I like them. I think they're really hard. Anything that can survive extreme weather, inclement weather, swarms, there's a cycle up here that we've figured out that about every seven years, a uncommon moth comes through and draws. I say uncommon because it doesn't have a common name. That's how uncommon it is. Its larvae completely defoliate the hackberries overnight and then drop to the ground on webs and everything. That's all they eat is the hackberries. It doesn't kill them. They just pop new leaves back out. Anything that has the ability to stay alive that well and get through adversity that well is good in my book.

I've seen a couple that have been pruned from very young age correctly and they were absolutely gorgeous.

Doug: Does it flower?

Aaron: Not in a conventional, not like open petals, more like an oak does. You have catkins, a small, weird-- Not something people think of as a flower.

Doug: Back to our having success with our tree planting. We've got natives, we keep them watered. What about fertilization?

Aaron: Fertilization is definitely helpful for any tree situation. You want to be careful how and when you fertilize initially. Sometimes it can be deterrent to root spread. Typically, first year, we don't do much in the way of fertilization. You want that tree to get used to its environment. You want it to go from the soil it's in into the soil it's supposed to be growing into. Then once it's established, come the next year. We started on a health program just to keep it as strong as possible with things like fertilization, humates, phosphonates, anything that can help it survive and get through everything it's up against.

Doug: Do people come to Texas from the East and other areas and want to grow the things that they grew back home?

Aaron: Yes. That and people visit those places and then come back home to Texas and want to plant things. The big thing is people want color. There's not a lot of Texas natives that are colored in the fall. There's one, I believe, native or naturalized maple in Texas. Sugar maples and bigtooth maples, I believe, are the only ones that are native. Other maples, it's not easy to get them established here. It's hard to get them through the first summer even. Part of that is planting correctly. There's a Shantung maple, which is this nice small tree that does stay smaller and it does do well with droughts and it does put on a decent amount of color.

Chinese pistache has become a really big staple for a lot of people because it will handle droughts well. It doesn't have a lot of insect or fungal issues and it doesn't get very large. That one's jumped up in there. Everybody and their mom wants a Japanese maple, which is breaking the number one rule we've talked about because all Japanese maples are started in Oregon. That's not a recipe for success if you're going to plant it in Texas. If you can't put it in darn near full shade, it's going to get scorched every summer. Then that scorching is going to lead to stress and that stress is going to attract woodborers.

Planting correctly, if you have the access to the resources to nurture a tree the way it wants to be nurtured, meaning if it needs a certain amount of water, give it to it. It is a tree that can withstand our droughts, which is already pretty much narrows you down to stuff not grown in the north. If you plant it right, you've got a decent chance. The big thing there is with, for instance, maples and red oaks, if you don't wrap the trunks when you plant them, they're going to get scorched. If you expect a tree with thin bark like that to stand in full western Texas sun, especially right after being planted, if you plant in the spring, without getting a trunk wound, that's not going to happen.

You have to wrap it with the white cloth that you can buy to act as a filter to lessen the impact of the light for the first year or two.

Doug: Tell me a little bit about that planting and wrapping that and how long does it need to be wrapped for?

Aaron: I would say first year or two. It depends on how big you start with, which is another thing we should talk about. It depends because the bark will get thicker or be thicker on a larger tree. Once it's furrowed or started to furrow, you're in pretty good shape. The difference is when trees are in nurseries, a lot of the time they're standing in blocks. They're shading each other like a forest. Those trunks are not accustomed to direct sunlight, let alone 105 to 110 degree heat and direct sunlight. You take that and you stick it out in the full sun the part facing usually the west or the southwest will scorch.

Just like we get sunburned, it'll just get so hot that the tissue will get weakened and not only will it possibly crack on its own, it'll attract woodborers. It all goes back to stress attracts woodborers and then their larva will destroy that tissue right there. Then you're trying to have a tree established while it seals a third of its trunk, which is not an easy task.

Doug: In Texas, would you prefer to plant a more mature tree?

Aaron: No. I would not prefer that anywhere. Smaller trees establish easier. Smaller trees don't need a lot. They don't need nearly as much water. They don't need nearly as much food. They're quicker to acclimate. Also, smaller trees are a lot less often to be root-bound when you get them so they have less chance of already having girdling roots or having been cut out of the ground if it's a ball and burlap tree versus a container. There's a funny thing that some people know, some people don't. If you plant a small tree and a larger tree, often the smaller tree will outgrow the larger tree. The example I used this morning was a 15-gallon versus a 30-gallon.

There's a darn good chance that 15-gallon is going to pass the 30-gallon because it'll start growing before the 30-gallon will. It'll establish faster and once the roots have established, the tree will start putting on growth.

Doug: As long as you do that wrapping, the small tree's fine.

Aaron: Yes. Honestly, I haven't noticed that happening as much on smaller trees. That may be coincidence but it may be that people aren't planting many smaller trees so I don't have the sample to observe. I'm not a big fan of planting big trees. It seems to go poorly. The methods used to plant big trees are self-defeating sometimes. A spade truck will very easily glaze the soil if it's too heavy in clay and that is just like putting a brick wall where the roots need to go.

As I mentioned, I'm not the biggest fan of ball and burlap trees because I don't think cutting a tree out of the ground and then replanting it somewhere else sets you up for success, whereas I can just correctly score and tease a root ball on a container-grown tree and make sure the roots are still intact and going the right direction.

Doug: In general, what kind of soil are you planting in there?

Aaron: In my area in north Texas, it's a mixture of sandy loam and clay. Typically, it's a layer of one and then a layer of the other. It depends. We're in an interesting meeting between the Blackland Prairie and the eastern forest. We're right in the middle of two or three different regions so we have different types of soil. We were just doing a planting this morning with an employee who used to live in central Texas. He hates planting. That's because in Austin, you only have a few inches of soil before you hit rock. He's asking if we needed jackhammers and rock spades and everything. I was like, "No, we don't," because we can plant without hitting rocks. We've got several feet of soil. It varies a lot.

Sometimes it varies on the same property. A lot of our neighborhoods up here are reclaimed pastures. The dirt is trucked in from God knows where. Sometimes you've got red dirt from Oklahoma that's been brought down and put on top of everything else. when they do the terraforming. That stuff doesn't have the same, it's sandier. You've got a different type of composition there as well. The big thing is you want to mix the dirt between the edge of the hole and the root ball. If you have a tree that's sitting in one kind of soil going into a different kind of soil, you want to have a half and half of those soils put together in the disturbed soil that you're creating when you're planting.

Which brings us to one of the other two biggest problems people do when they plant them is that you have to obviously make the hole wider than the root ball. You have to tease the roots out, and you have to return some of the soil in so that when the root leaves the root ball it's not hitting a wall. It's hitting softer soil. It's easier for it to continue growing before it hits the compact soil.

Doug: Of course, not planting too deep.

Aaron: That was going to be the next one. Too high is much better than too deep. Too deep will undoubtedly cause girdling roots and fungal issues. It's funny because a lot of it comes down to girdling roots. If you don't stop the circling nature of the roots from a container, they're going to keep doing that. They're never going to grow away from the tree. They're going to just keep growing in a circle and the tree's going to strangle itself. It's a very common issue with planting that people don't do. Conversely, if you have a tree that was cut out of the ground too large for the size root ball they're cutting, you have a root that was stubbed off, and just like on a branch, its new growth will be going sideways.

It's not going to regrow straight out. Those roots will grow in a circle because they're growing 90 degrees from the original root. They'll end up wrapping over each other and strangling each other.

Doug: I think for homeowners, when they do plant a tree that's in a container, they're afraid to cut those roots. Could you talk a little bit about the right way to do that?

Aaron: If you're not used to it can be alarming. The first thing I do when I pull a tree out of a pot is I pull out a razor knife out of my pocket and I cut about three inches into the root ball straight down, every six inches going around it to stop that pattern of roots moving. They're tiny roots. We're not cutting anything main. We're cutting the roots that will become larger if they survive. Any small amount of damage you're causing in that situation just pales in comparison to what you'll have to deal with if you don't do it. The tree won't root into the ground if you don't do it. It won't grow because the tree won't grow until it's rooted into the ground. Most trees, some somehow pull it off.

I have a customer who's had a tree in the ground for five years. Hasn't grown more than a few inches. That's because you go up and shake it and you can see the whole root ball move because whoever planted it planted it wrong in almost every way. In comparison, that was probably a 45 or 60-gallon tree, still only about eight, nine feet tall. I planted a 10-gallon redbud in my backyard that I got from the front of a Kroger last year, later in the season than I normally would like. It grew six inches last year. Started putting on new growth within a few months. Because it was smaller and I teased it, and I made sure to put it in right, and it established right away.

Doug: Now, is there anything you can do for that one that was planted wrong?

Aaron: So far, not much. We've tried ripping it up, pulling it up and replanting it. Transplanting is so stressful that it probably would not work. In this case, anything we'd cut root-wise would have to be fairly sizable roots because of how long it's been sitting there. I told the customer, your best option would be to replace it. He's not ready to do it yet. We've been doing everything we can to make the tree as healthy as possible. Giving it health treatments to help it defend against the problems it's incurring because of its issues. Because it's root-bound and not established, it stresses out in the heat. It's also a maple. He's been losing branches to woodborers.

We've been treating it to prevent woodborer activity, treating it with phosphonates to prevent heat stress and encourage wound sealing and feeding it, or rather fertilizing it, giving it fertilizer so it has everything it needs, but it's not really improving. Some people are ready to let go of something and some people aren't.

Doug: That's what I was going to ask. If you're spending all that money on trying to keep this thing barely alive, I guess it's just a personal preference that, like, "Listen, I've had the tree here. I like the tree. I'd hate to start over again." From listening to you and your perspective, it seems to make much more sense to just replant.

Aaron: Yes, it definitely does. Some people just aren't ready to let go. A lot of people plant trees for sentimental reasons. Either it's for the loss of someone they love because it reminds them of a tree their parents had or they saw when they were a kid and they get really attached to a tree. Trees become members of the family very easily. Whereas, in a couple of years, you could spend the same amount of money as you would to replant a new tree and in that same couple of years, of a newly-planted tree it could establish and outgrow the tree that was there before it. Some people just aren't ready. It's the same thing as with removals and lots of things.

Some people aren't ready to let trees go and the best we can do is educate them about what's going on. Then, if they don't want to do it, give them the options to try to make it better.

Doug: I think as tree lovers, we can all understand that, even though scientifically, it probably doesn't make sense. The heart wants what the heart wants. Before I let you go, let's talk a little bit more about watering and your feelings on how people do water their trees.

Aaron: A lot of people don't understand that too much water can be just as bad, if not worse, than not enough water. Roots do not absorb oxygen while they're wet. If roots are constantly soaked, they're not able to breathe well. It's like a kid with asthma. It's impacting the way the tree can function. If you're constantly watering your trees or your tree is in a landscape that you're constantly watering because you have flowers that need that much water or other landscape plants that do, you may be actually doing harm to your tree. A lot of times the trees we see fall over in storms have been overwatered to the point where a few feet from the trunk, the roots are only two inches thick.

They're not very large at all. That's what led to the failure. The best thing you can possibly do is spend $20, if that on Amazon, if you want to know about it and buy a moisture meter. It's a simple dial with a probe on it. You just stick it in the ground and it goes from dry to wet and tells you where you're at. If you're not in dry or the beginning of moist, don't water. If you're in wet, you definitely should not water because that tree doesn't need it yet. Some trees have more water needs than others. We talked about that a little bit already. Knowing how much water your tree needs is a good thing but no tree wants to be wet all the time.

Only, to be fair, bald cypress have no problem with it. Swamp trees are a whole different animal. They'll put up their snorkels out of the ground to get oxygen so they can actually circumvent the situation. They have ways to adapt to it. Knowing how wet your tree is, I have a customer from a couple months ago who called. Actually, it was last summer. I'm sorry. She called me in the middle of the summer because her tree was dropping leaves. She actually got onto this idea before I got to the appointment. She checked soil and much to her surprise, it was too wet while it's 105 degrees outside because of the neighborhood alignment. The neighbor's tree across the street blocked the morning sun.

Her tree blocked its own middle of the day sun and then her house blocked the evening sun. It never was in full sun. The ground was never drying up with how often she was watering. She stopped watering just altogether and the tree stopped dropping leaves. Then she switched to once a week instead of three times a week or whatever it was that she was doing. The planting we did this morning, we were replacing crape myrtles that declined. Lo and behold, when we pulled them out, they were standing in water. Something about the soil composition of this guy's house made it to where they didn't drain.

We talked about altering his watering schedule, getting a water meter so that he could tell how wet the ground was before he decided to give it more water.

Doug: I never heard those above-ground growths of a bald cypress called snorkels. Boy, does that make sense.

Aaron: They're not perfectly understood. There's a couple main theories on it. When you think about the environment they're used to being in, it's the part that comes up above the water. Knowing that roots that are constantly wet don't get enough oxygen, it makes perfect sense. There's a picture somewhere online that I saw years ago of a swamp that drains itself every couple of years somehow. A natural process with the aquifer underneath or whatever. It was very interesting to see the roots of the bald cypress just go straight down instead of straight out like most trees. They have to get from the ground, under the water, up to the surface. Those roots need oxygen because even in soil, a root that's too deep doesn't get any oxygen.

Doug: Aaron, I don't care where people live. You've given us great tips on how to be successful with our trees and I sure appreciate it. Great to talk to you again, and I'm sure we'll talk again somewhere down the line. Thanks so much.

Aaron: Of course, be happy to.

Doug: Lots of good stuff from Aaron on this week's episode. Now, we put out this podcast every Thursday with the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster and I'm having fun, and I hope you enjoy listening, too. If you'd like to get in touch with us, there's a couple different ways to do it. You can send us an email at podcasts@davey.com or you can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your idea certainly could be on a future podcast. We'd love to hear from you. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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