Planting and Watering Trees Properly in the Fall

What’s the difference between planting trees now as opposed to planting them in the spring?

In the spring, generally we get ample amounts of rain. Now rain by itself won’t always get water deep enough in the soil to water trees, but when you go out to water, you can water less because you already have some moisture present at the surface.

This time of year there is zero moisture down even a foot to 18 inches. We’re seeing that there’s almost no moisture, so it is going to require more effort in watering this time of year. But putting a tree in this time of year is still very good for the tree. The tree will always do better in the ground in the pot above ground.

Not everybody understands or realizes this, but in the fall all of the plants produce a ton of root growth. So even if we were to have a frost tomorrow, which is not going to happen for a few weeks at least, but when we have that frost, the top of the plant goes dormant and everybody thinks it’s done. Its root system is still growing for four to six weeks.

It’s that root growth that happens in the fall which is why we get new growth in the spring. If we don’t have roots in the fall we won’t get new growth in the spring. That’s why having some moisture in the ground right now would be really good for the plants. 

So if you’re reading this and your plants are looking a little weepy, the leaves are wilting down, go out there and give it some water. and it’s gonna take a while to get water deeply into the soil. So I talked with a gentleman a few weeks ago, he didn’t realize that spraying the foliage wasn’t how you watered. I had to explain to him, I said the plants absorb their moisture through their root system.

You want to let that hose trickle on the base of that tree on either side for 10 minutes. Not running full blast, we don’t want to flood the area out. What we want to do is allow the water time to seep in, and it’s very difficult to stand there with a sprinkling can for 15 minutes on each side. Remember you have it going. You can set a timer on your phone, that’s one of the ways we do things at the nursery when we turn irrigation on and off.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).

The other thing you can do, if you don’t have hose access, which a lot of people don’t, you can take a 5-gallon bucket and drill some like 1/16th inch holes in the bottom of the bucket, put that on the left side of the tree. Go fill up a bucket, dump it into there, it’ll drip out very slowly and basically do the same idea. And you would do that on all four sides of the tree. That will allow slow watering without having to stand there.

They make things called gator bags that are better, they have weep holes in the bottom of them. You just basically fill up the bag, it wraps around the trunk of the tree and then very slowly leeches that water into the ground. That’s a godsend when we have this type of super super dry weather.