Digging large or small trees

[Txhorticulture]

I remember talking to a guy that designs new neighborhoods. He said they try to save trees and will generally try to move large ones (trunks over 4 inches) rather than destroy them. They don't bother with smaller trees because he said they were unlikely to survive. Even very large trees are moved with tree spades with high degree of success. They do not wait for ideal season btw

Anyway his comment about size seemed counter-intuitive to me. I would have thought young trees had the same or better chance of surviving. Do you have better success digging up larger or smaller material?

 

[tmpgh]

We all seem to do quite well collecting small trees if the conditions are right.

Although, it is important to consider the differences between what we do and what a city planner does. They just want to move the tree. They dig it and most of it's roots up, don't rake the old soil out, rearrange them, prune them to fit a container, etc. They get it out of the ground with as much soil and root as possible and get it back into the ground as fast as they can.

I suspect that if you have the room, time and equipment, you could do this with bonsai material as well, and at any time of year. If you have a forklift to get out all of that soil and root and the space to put it back in ground with no disruption of the root mass, it should live.

The issues with bonsai as a hobby and collecting at the wrong season is that we DO disturb the crap out of the roots. First, we only dig up about 1/4 of the roots, cutting away everything too far from the trunk. Then we cut off everything that's too deep, too big, too ugly. Then, instead of the ground, which is nothing at all like a pot, no matter how big your pot is, we put it in a container.

If you do this at the time of year during which leaf buds are already formed and swelling, meaning the energy stored in the roots has already been pushed to the foliage, then you have a good chance that the foliage will then create the energy needed to build roots to keep the plant alive. The longer you are from bud break, the less likely this is to happen.

Please, please, please, accept that people have been practicing bonsai for several times the length of your experience on earth and accept that maybe they weren't all incompetent or afraid to try new things.

 

[Poink88]

Maybe he meant it is not worth their time to move smaller trees...just said it wrong (it happens). You can buy $5 small trees and almost guaranteed to survive...why bother collecting and transplanting them? I basically take the same position, I only collect bigger stock.

 

[M. Frary]

Ran a tree spade for 3 years for a nursery. The bigger the tree the less chance of survival. Smaller trees you get more roots. We only dug trees to sell in the spring. We would transplant in fall but we never balled and burlapped at that time. Best success for digging any temperate tree is spring. Period.