How to Plant a Fruit Tree

Video Transcript

"When you plant your tree what you do is these are the tools you use. You use a post-hole digger to dig the hole and you make a hole the depth of the root bulb and three times as wide. And you remove, with an ordinary shovel, you remove everything out of the whole so that you have a clean straight line, almost like a cylinder- a wide cylinder, straight down. It has straight sides. And you clean that out. And when you remove the dirt out of the hole you put it in two piles. The top soil, the first three to four inches, you put in one pile, and then the dirt that’s below that, you put in another pile. The pile that has the top soil is the good pile. That’s the pile you want to be sure that goes back into the hole. And in that pile, you want to take your compost- this is compost I’ve made in my own compost bin and this has been making for about two years. This is the gardener’s gold. So I would mix half compost with half top soil and put that back in the hole. So what I would do is place the root bulb down in the empty hole, mix the compost with the top soil pile, and then gently place the mixture around the root bulb and keep filling it in until it is completely level with the ground. You don’t want to pile it up, you don’t want it to come up on the trunk of the tree, that would be detrimental to the tree. You just want it to be totally flat. And then the last step in planting is mulch. So after you get that leveled out and you get the tree comfortable, you add about three inches of mulch on top of that. And then, of course, after you plant it you want to water it immediately. Be sure to totally soak it, and whenever you plant anything you want to water it every other day or so unless it rains for the first couple of weeks, and then you can go to twice a week, and then you can go to once a week, and then- like this fruit tree which is twenty-two years old, I never water it. "