bobm
Garden Master
Good luck with your trees Nifty ! I planted 100 Coast Redwood trees ( 12" tall seedlings) around the 2 1/2 acres of grounds around our ranch house near Fresno, Cal. 20 years ago. Being this is a high desert type of environment, I installed an underground drip irrigation system with 2 control valves at the house... I dug holes down to 40" and 3 ft. across ( to get below the hardpan so that the taproot can go far down ) , then got 10 ft. perforated plastic sewer line pipe and cut them into 3- 40" long pieces and set them down into the planting holes so the drip water goes down the 40" of pipe ( the pipe top set at 2" above soil line). This keeps the soil evenly moist. Since Redwoods like acid soil, I backfilled the holes with a mix of horse manure with the native soil and planted the tree seedlings. I also use wheelbarrow full of horse manure as mulch around the trees. Today 78 of them are alive and well and 30 ft. tall. Since the redwoods have a long taproot as well as MANY feeder roots that spread out 20-30 ft. +/- around the tree,( today, I can dig down anywhere about 50 ft. around the trees and run into the yellow pencil thick feeder roots ) they don't take to replanting very well. These feeder roots are known to fuse together when they come across it's neighbors' roots. So they can transfer water among each other... if one tree is at a lower level by a stream where they can take up water then transfer it up to trees on top of the hill / mountain. ( I learned about this little gem from a plant pathologist at UCD). Nice adaptation ! If you have the old style clay sewer pipe / or sewer leach field , these roots will work themselves in and clog the sewer line.
