Soil Remediation
Soil remediation is essential to root health, one of the most important but overlooked aspects of tree care. The soil in your garden or yard is probably not the most hospitable place for your roots to grow. In contrast to a forest floor, the soil on an urban or suburban property is likely to be highly compacted, anaerobic, arid, and lacking in nutrients.
Unfortunately, some of the things we do to help the soil in our yards actually just compounds the problem. For example, a typical spray irrigation system places a large volume of water quickly on the top layer of the soil. Even though a sprinkler can soak the top layer of soil, the weight of the water only compacts layers beneath, making saturation difficult or impossible.
Similarly, soil aerators of home landscapes only address the top inch of soil and do nothing for the deeper zones that a tree should be growing in. To improve the deep root zones for trees, we need to use products and methods that are designed for tree care.
A plan for the soil remediation for trees will include a vertical channel through the different soil horizons that can deliver water and oxygen to the deepest horizons. Remember that soil must have both oxygen and water in order to support root growth. Here (see video) we have a device installed in the root zone of a tree that penetrates the soil and breaks the barrier to water absorption and gas exchange.
Make sure they address both air and water penetration. That's the basics of soil remediation for your trees!
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More About Soil Remediation
Good Tree Root Health: Oxygen. — In the tips of the roots where absorption takes place, oxygen is critical to root life.
Good Tree Root Health and Microbes. — The forest floor provides an ideal environment for their propagation, and they are constantly cycling through the soil food web. In contrast, urban and suburban soil can be seriously lacking in these microbes.
Root Aeration Tubes — There are numerous options for root aeration tubes. A popular design involves PVC plastic pipes.
Rootwell Products — The Rootwell Products, direct-to-root system has been engineered to permanently enhance a tree's natural ability to absorb oxygen, water, and nutrients.
Soil Compaction — In the built environment where most of us live, soil compaction is a necessity.
Soil Composition — When we consider the make-up of soil we are looking at the percentages of three different components, sand, clay, and silt.
Soil Food Web — What horticulturists and soil scientists refer to as the soil food web is an intricate network of life forms.
Soil Structure — Soil structure essentially refers to the amount of macropores in the soil.
Tree Root Health: Watering Trees. — What we see in lawns that are irrigated conventionally is tree roots growing at or near the surface in the only space that they can live.
Trees Suffering From Drought? — Take a walk in an established forest in this area, and you will see that the problem is not really the drought.
Water Is Not Enough — This tree is watered daily by an automatic irrigation system. Despite the abundance of water, it is stressed and losing leaves in July.
Why is That Tree Not Growing? — Why is it that the trees in some landscapes never seem to grow past the half-way point of their mature size?
