The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
JIM McCOLL’S GARDENING COLUMN
Planting a tree is not for today or indeed for tomorrow. If you do the job properly that specimen has the propensity to give you pleasure, delighting you, your family and visiting friends for decades.
It is a significant investment but undoubtedly value for money. It doesn’t help decision making to read a headline like “autumn planting is the key to successful gardening, not spring or summer”.
The perpetrator of these scare tactics homing in on trees and shrubs, goes on to assert that “gardeners should NOT plant in the spring and summer”.
Following up by singling out the planting of trees. “By planting in the autumn using beneficial mycorrhizal fungi and natural fertilisers, very little aftercare is required and the chance of successful establishment and healthy growth is maximised.” That is quite true, but…
Having just planted six new young trees at Beechgrove this week – I beg to differ on the principal point.
As I have indicated in the past, in the days before container-grown trees and shrubs became more of the norm, one might say in the “bare root” era, the advice was to plant in the dormant season (October to March) so long as soil conditions permit, i.e, not saturated or frozen.
Nowadays, that advice can be overridden if you buy a containerised plant which can be planted at any time of the year so long as soil conditions permit.
By claiming that all woody plants will establish much better if planted in the autumn, and the more you table-thump on this point the more you will deter people from planting woody perennials at this time, and that is misguided advice.
I could go into a whole list of “what ifs”, to support/oppose this fairly categorical assertion, but there is an overriding comment to cover it all – use your common sense.
For example, what if you have just bought an expensive tree in October and the ground is saturated?
Common sense tells you to sheugh it in, in a drier corner or “plant” it in a bucket of soil (basically to prevent the root system from being desiccated) until such times as the designated site is fit to be made ready for planting.
On the other hand, if you plant a bare root plant this week, having opened up the planting hole in the process, the soil will certainly start to dry out, in which case common sense will tell you that the plant roots will need a good soaking at the outset and be aware, Mother Nature might not help out in the coming few weeks, further watering might be necessary.
Long-term, whether it is autumn, winter or spring planted, it will make no difference to the performance of the bush or tree.
The same writer went on to irritate me further by asserting that for too long farmers and horticulturists have viewed the soil as a lifeless inert growing medium. That is a load of rubbish.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
From previous experience I can confirm some commercial growers have taken risks with soil conditions, driven by financial pressures, but to tar everyone with the same brush is totally unjustified for one simple reason – successful farmers to backyard gardeners know you have to replace what you have taken out if you are to harvest acceptable yields from your soil, and most of the gardeners I know are very well aware of that.
Mono-cropping is damned and while I am not really in favour of it, in some instances it can be made to work.
My dad was a professional horticulturist all his days (in public parks service, ending his career as a parks superintendent) but in the back garden he fancied himself to win prizes at the local show for his onions.
He mono-cropped a square in the garden with onions, year in and year out, but of course he kept adding copious quantities of farmyard manure each winter until that square was at least a foot higher than the rest of the plot and he did win prizes.
The author in my sights this week talks about dead soil. I haven’t met a gardener in all my career who would acknowledge that such a soil category exists. It is a simple case of scare-mongering. Rant is now over. At last the weeds are beginning to grow, a sure sign ground conditions are improving. I can see a busy weekend ahead. I’ll be glad to get my tatties planted (Casablanca), some veg, plants moved into the cold frame enroute to being planted out. Then we can get started filling hanging baskets, troughs and tubs.