Five Year Native Tree Challenge: Gabler’s Loblolly Pine

[Gabler]

 

[Gabler]

 

[Gabler]

 

[HorseloverFat]

Neat!

I’m excited to witness the documentation of it’s progression.

 

[Gabler]

Neat!

I’m excited to witness the documentation of it’s progression.

Thanks. I'm hoping I can get enough of the root ball this spring that I don't kill it. The tree has been replanted once, so the root ball should be relatively compact, but you can never know until you get in there, and pines really hate having their roots chopped back too hard. I'll defininitely need to use an oversized temporary pot to let the roots recover.

 

[HorseloverFat]

Thanks. I'm hoping I can get enough of the root ball this spring that I don't kill it. The tree has been replanted once, so the root ball should be relatively compact, but you can never know until you get in there, and pines really hate having their roots chopped back too hard. I'll defininitely need to use an oversized temporary pot to let the roots recover.

Definitely.. that root-mass vs. mortality rate comparison is a real “nail-biter”

And conifers are SO passive aggressive.. they can take years to die from the point where you effectively “killed them”.. if enough is stored.

Pines also will often show little, even NO flush growth in the growing season following collection.. giving the IMPRESSION that they are CTD (circling the drain)...

So be patient, VERY slow to “act/perform” on him/her until you are SURE... Your tree will thank you.


And if you THINK it’s “on it’s way out”... just be patient... I’ve (others also) HAVE been surprised.

 

[HorseloverFat]

oversized temporary pot

Tis a good idea.. remembering two things...

Don’t go too big.. you want the water to stay where it belongs. I’d say like a black 3-gallon Nursery equivalent.

Also collections need protection from vast swings in temperature around their root-masses, and ALSO benefit from warmer soil/substrate situations after collection... so like a black 3-gallon nursery container or equivalent...

Dang.... really “pushing” those today..

People who didn’t know would assume that I SOLD black, 3-gallon nursery containers.

 

[Gabler]

I have an old 15-gallon wash tub to use and a tractor with a bucket to lift a large rootball. I’ll dig in late March, probably, depending on the weather.

 

[HorseloverFat]

I have an old 15-gallon wash tub to use and a tractor with a bucket to lift a large rootball. I’ll dig in late March, probably, depending on the weather.

That’s a great solution.

 

[Gabler]

We're past the risk of frost, and the buds are just starting to open, so I collected the loblolly pine. I got a decent root ball, leaving much of the field soil. Because the tree is so large and heavy, I covered the root ball in perlite and peat, rather than a heavier substrate. The "pot" is a fifty gallon grow bag. I removed the three most vigorous branches from the apex, and I removed the tips of some of the middling branches, so that I could encourage the tree to put some energy into its lower branches. I left the majority of the roots and foliage completely undisturbed.

 

[Gabler]

 

[Gabler]

 

[Gabler]

When I collected this tree, I cut off the ends of several upper branches to encourage growth lower on the tree. The tree is now producing a second flush of growth near all of those cuts. That leads me to believe loblolly pines can probably be safely decandled during refinement. Further testing is of course needed to confirm this, but it makes sense, given that loblolly pines fill a substantially similar ecological niche to Japanese Black Pines in low-lying coastal regions of the American South and Mid-Atlantic.

 

[Gabler]

Still growing strong.

 

[Gabler]

The tree was really healthy right up through the early fall, when hundreds of pine saw flies attacked it, stripping the upper branches of their needles in about half a day before I could spray the tree with permethrin. Fortunately, I had planned to chop off the top anyway, so it wasn’t a huge loss, provided the tree can bounce back from such a heavy chop.

 

[Gabler]

 

[Gabler]

I also dug my hand around at the edge of the pot in three spots, and there’s tons of fine feeder roots. I couldn’t get a good picture, though. I didn’t want to really disturb the roots. I just wanted to check the progress from last year.

 

[Gabler]

For comparison, here’s the tree’s sibling, also collected last spring, showing what the foliage would be like right now but for the sawflies. For some reason, the larvae did not attack any nearby trees so far as I was able to discern. This other tree was just a few feet away. Much bushier.

 

[Gabler]

Slowly recovering from the pine sawflies that showed up out of nowhere.

 

[Gabler]

A quick update.