The Planting of Trees
We plant all of our bare root stock into Fabric Grow Bags. They have been and are manufactured by High Caliper Growing Systems, (www.treebag.com) in the USA for over 30 years. It’s a proven beneficial method to growing stronger, healthier and faster growing trees.
When this tree is harvested with a 24” tree spade, all roots outside the circle are cutoff.
Trees grown in a 24” fabric bag develop a very fibrous root system through self pruning. When the root contacts the inside rough fabric wall, its catches and prunes off. There is a 4” rule, whereby when you prune a root, 4” back. 2 more roots develop. Some of the roots that penetrate the bag are very thin and collect moisture and nutrients drawn into the tree. The carbohydrates from the tree that travel to the roots are trapped inside the bag, thereby storing energy for new root development when the bag is removed.
They say that field grown trees harvested balled-in-burlap and planted go through 3 stages over 3 years;
Sleep the first year, survive with very little growth.
Creep the second year, and grow a little bit
Leap the third year where typical growth rate of the species resumes.
Trees grown with root pruning systems experience much less shock at harvesting, and resume their typical growth patterns very quickly.
I am sure you can see the benefit of this being the root system planted at your landscape site.
The most desirable root system is that of a broad shallow growth.
The fabric grow bag system speeds up the process vs mother nature.
Typical field planted trees have roots that spread. The wire circle shows a diameter of 24”
Here is the massive root system as removed from the bag on the left. The right shows how the root system looks after the dirt is washed away.
You can see all the fiber roots that were contained in the fiber bag. The bag is full of roots. Over 80%. To the right of that, you can see how fewer roots there are from the field planted tree. This is the contents of the wire basked and burlap.
Here is another sample of the root structure near the inside of the outer edge of the fabric bag.
Here is the washed off tree spaded root system from the field planted tree.
This is a root system of a tree grown in a plastic pot. The roots circle.