I am planning to plant 14 Skyrocket junipers around March 15. I am just south of Denver (6100 elevation) -- junipers will be planted on the south side with plenty of sun and pretty warm microclimate.

I ordered them from Evergreen Nursery (http://www.evergreenplantnursery.com) and they do offer an option to hold on your order and ship it at leater date. They ship plants kind of bare root, but with a little more soil attached to roots compared to "pure" bare root.

I am planting too early ? Should I wait a couple of weeks ?

Thanks for your help !

[/Mr Cautious ex-landscaper]

Dan

I am afraid it will be too difficult for me distinguish if the soil is gloppy and gooey from recent snowstorm or if it's an indication that I am planting my junipers too early, I am not that technical :)

Is there a better indication when it might be the right time to plant -- a date maybe, technically I am pretty good with dates :)

On another thread I replaced Dan’s "gloppy and gooey" technical terms with my own technical term: mud balls! In other words, go out to where you’re going to plant them, dig down in a little bit—several inches—and take some soil out of the hole. If you wind up with a mud ball—or worse—in your hands, it’s TOO wet! When you can take some soil out of the hole and squeeze it between your fingers and it easily crumbles, then the soil is dry enough to plant in. So I just said the same thing Dan did, but does it help at all saying it that way? It’s kinda just one of those things you need to get a "feel" for. As I also said on the other thread, if you’re not sure the soil is dry enough when you do the "mud or crumble" test, wait at least a week and test it again.

Recent wet weather and melting snow around here would lead me to believe your soil is probably too wet at this point. Mine is too wet up here on the north end, and you usually get considerably more snow down south of Denver than I do up here. With the cool weather we’re expecting for this next week, if you can delay shipment for a couple weeks, I’d probably recommend doing that. If you get them now, or whenever you get them, you can store them in a cold (but not freezing hard) place until you’re able to plant them out, so if you do get them and the soil—or weather—makes it difficult to impossible to plant them right away, all is not lost.

When you are getting ready to plant, I recommend testing your soil in several places where you’re going to plant since planting that many will obviously cover a pretty large area, and since the soil can vary a lot from area to area.

Did that help at all?
Skybird

P.S. If it didn’t, how can we try to help more—but a specific date isn’t gonna happen since nobody knows what our wild and wacky Rocky Mountain weather is gonna do.

Your post indeed helped a lot -- I think I now understand the reasoning for need to be cautious with "gloppy and gooey" soil -- while we are still "freezing at night" type of weather, the gooey soil is more likely to freeze and damage the roots. Am I right here ?

Following your advice I delayed shipment by 3 weeks (ETA 4/2) -- I am still going to do the gooey soil test, but since we are almost out of "below 0" nights at this point (early April), I think it should be pretty safe to plant even if do have a bit of gooey soil, did I get it right ?

If I may ask one more question: do these rules apply to all trees/bushes ? We are going to be planting 30 Austrian pines (1 foot seedlings) in very early April (we have a big property) -- we also just picked up about a dozen hybrid tea rose bushes at Lowes (nicely priced BTW). Should we use the same "crumbling test" for Austirans and roses as well ?

Thanks for your help !

Here’s how I put it in that other thread: If you work in the area and plant when it’s too wet, it’ll become badly compacted, and when it dries out you’ll wind up with something akin to concrete.

That’s especially true out here where most of us have some degree of clay, which, because of the nature of the clay particles, tends to naturally pack together much more tightly than the soil in, say, the Midwest where they have nice loamy black soil. So mostly you’re just trying to keep from creating a bunch of clay bricks—unless you’re trying to build a house, that is! And as I implied above, you don’t want to be walking around too much in areas where you’re gonna plant when the soil is really wet either since that just tends to pack the whole area down, potentially making it harder to work in when you start digging.

The cold could be a factor, but for the most part I think that as long as the plants are well hardened off that wouldn’t be as much of a problem as compacted soil would be, tho I agree with Dan that if something was planted and then just sitting in cold, wet clay soil for too long it could cause problems. If your soil is dry enough when you plant them, they should be just fine even if it stays cold out. When you plant them, water them in well, and then don’t water again until the soil just BELOW the bottom of the roots "crumbles." Dig down into the soil right NEXT TO where they’re planted to do the crumble test to figure out when they need to be watered again after they’re planted (don’t dig into the backfill soil). If you keep the surface of the soil on the level of the existing roots wet all the time, the roots have no incentive to grow deeper in search of water, so your watering pattern should be to gradually stretch out more and more between waterings as they start to grow. That promotes new, deep root growth, which is what will make them good, healthy plants/trees, and will make them as drought tolerant is possible.

And, yes! The "dry enough" soil rule applies to anything and everything you’re going to plant. The "crumble test" is a really good way not only to determine when the soil’s dry enough to plant in it, but it’s also a great test to decide when plants need to be watered, as I explained above. It works really well when people are having watering problems and can’t figure out when or how much to water.

To establish good watering timing, dig down into the soil in the area in question, either to the approximate bottom of the existing roots or 6-8" down—whichever comes first. Take some soil out of the bottom of the hole and squeeze it in your hand.

~ If it packs together and doesn’t easily crumble, the soil is wet enough. Wait several days and dig again—in a new spot.

~ If it packs together and then easily crumbles between your fingers, it’s about time to water—deeply.

~ If it doesn’t pack together at all, it’s way, way too dry. Water deeply, wait 24 hours and repeat.

When you do this 2 or 3 times in a particular area, you’ll get a pretty good feel for how often you need to water to keep the deep soil wet enough and let the top several inches of the soil dry out enough to establish healthy plants.

And to water most of our clay soils "deeply" you need to water slowly, which means either with a sprinkler with a fine spray, or watering for short (10-15 minute) periods of time and waiting an hour or two between the short periods. If the water is put down too quickly much of it will run off and not really soak in—again, because of the microscopic nature of clay soil.

If you want to find out if you’ve watered deeply enough, wait 24 hours after watering and then do the dig-down-and-check-your-crumble test again, always digging in a different spot since loosened soil won’t accurately reflect the moisture in the "undug" soil. If it doesn’t crumble any differently than it did before you watered, you didn’t water deeply enough. If it’s adequately watered, it shouldn’t crumble easily anymore.

Since you’re going to be planting so much I just thought I may as well post the whole "lesson!" Let me know if something isn’t clear.

It sounds like you have a lot of work ahead of you this year! Happy digging!
Skybird

Essentially what you are saying is: do not plant when the soil is too wet, regardless of the season, and during cold season in particular. Totally understand the reasoning for that, though my computer mind (I do software programming for living) says: but you are going to soak it up with water anyway after planting !!!

I do, however, wonder if "gloppy and gooey" soil issue can be addressed by:

1. Digging the hole 2-3 days before planting and allowing both hole and filler soil to dry out into crumbling state.
2. Adding polymer into filler soil, this should theoretically expand while sucking out the moisture, then contract and leave good air pockets.

As far as checking for moisture by doing dig out tests. I don't think it will be practical due to the number of plants. I have this moisture meter device which seems to work very nicely:

http://www.amazon.com/Luster-Leaf-1820-Rapitest-Moisture/dp/B001A5OR5I /ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=hi&qid=1268161856&sr=8-2

Any reason I should not use it in lieu of dig out test ?

Thanks again for taking time to answer my questions !

Oh, yeah! You get the cigar this time—even if you’re not gonna smoke it! ;-)

~ "Totally understand the reasoning for that, though my computer mind (I do software programming for living) says: but you are going to soak it up with water anyway after planting !!!"

How about this!

IF: you plant them when the soil is too wet
THEN: when you backfill the hole you’ll be compacting it without even realizing it because that "just happens" with wet clay soil.

IF: you plant them in soil that’s dry enough to work with
THEN: when you water them in well the water will cause the soil to settle some, but there won’t be any actual "force" (your hands or shovel) compacting it, and the water by itself won’t be enough of a force to actually squeeze all the air out of the soil—settling the soil is different than compacting it.

So if you
DO: the crumble test when you’re planting, the roots will get both the water and the air the roots need, so your plants will be a lot happier!

~ "As far as checking for moisture by doing dig out tests. I don't think it will be practical due to the number of plants."

Well the scope of your planting increased exponentially while I was posting that last response! Right after I posted it I saw your THIRTY tree thread! For the scale you’re talking about now, no, the moisture test isn’t gonna be very useful, but it’s still a good thing to know for your gardening in general so you can get an idea of if you’re plants are getting enough water—especially if you start having problems, since the large majority of gardening problems are caused by too much or too little water. So tuck it away in a data file somewhere and hang onto it!

~ "I have this moisture meter device which seems to work very nicely"

I didn’t used to have much confidence in moisture meters, but that was a long time ago and I think they’ve probably come out with some more accurate and usable ones by now, so that could work out pretty well, as long as you can stick it into the soil more than a couple inches. What’s happening in the top few inches of soil is pretty much irrelevant to the moisture level down where the roots are. I very much agree with the theory, if it’s working, don’t knock it, so—if it working for you.........

I still recommend doing the crumble test in a couple spots before you start planting. Since clay soil can differ SO much, a meter isn’t going to tell you how friable your particular clay is, and the crumble factor is more important than the actual degree of moisture.

~ Re: "Digging the hole 2-3 days before planting and allowing both hole and filler soil to dry out into crumbling state."

I’d recommend against that for a couple reasons, but David actually recommended it on the other thread, so I’m gonna go over there and read what he said again when I finish here! I’d recommend against it because the very fact that you’re digging in the soil when it’s "too wet" will compact it, and I suspect you’ll find that the soil you dig out of the hole and have sitting next to it will harden into hard, unusable lumps after a few days. At least that’s what’s happened to me in the past when I started turning over my veggie garden when the soil was still too wet. But then again, that happens in part of my veggie garden where the clay is heavier, and not so much in other parts, so it all gets back down to the nature of the clay soil that you happen to have. Maybe I’ll develop a split personality and change my opinion when I go over and reread David’s post! But I know for sure I won’t be digging in my veggie garden anymore till it gets to the crumble point. It was just too hard to try to un-lump the hard lumps once they got hard, and I actually wound up throwing most of the bigger ones in the dumpster.

I’m gonna comment on the polymer issue too, but I’m gonna do that over on the "enlarged scope" thread!

Skybird

So when I talk about pre-digging holes, the best time to do it is in the fall - I try to do this with the bigger potted fruit trees, but largely because 'that perfect spot' turns out to have some gigantic rock 6" underground, or as I said, its a 40 mph wind and sleet the day you want to plant them. Depending on the size of the root ball, this can also turn out to be a lot more work than it seems. I always get a kick out of watching those gardening shows where the star effortlessly digs down into two feet of top soil and within 30 seconds, has some huge hole. Here, I need pry bars, sledges, and an hour.

With these Soil Conservancy pine trees, we're talking a root ball thats 1.5" square at the top, maybe 8" deep - so its more a question of removing a shovel full of dirt, putting it to the side, plopping in the seedling, and as often as not, the removed soil dries out into some indestructible clod, so its easy to just scrape a bit of top soil in to fill the hole. Even then, dig 30 of them, and there will be surprises.

My place has ridiculous drainage - I forget and leave an irrigation hose on, come out the next morning and there's a foot of water, turn off the hose, and its gone in 15 minutes. So I'll defer to those with more experience on the front range. :-)

Thanks a lot for taking your time to teach us newbs ! :)