2019 Spring Home & Garden

PAGE 38 2019 SPRING HOME & GARDEN LINCOLN DAILY NEWS MAY 2, 2019 To see the process of transplanting a tree from a pot, watch ‘ Transplanting Large Mature Trees From Pots Made Easy’ Planting containerized or ball and burlap trees will get you a good start, but you may suffer from tree envy if you drive down streets and see mature trees in yards which provide ready shade and mature grace and beauty. You won’t find those kind of trees for sale at a big box store, but there are specialized nurseries which grow trees on and have the right equipment to transplant them to your yard. For instant shade, you may desire trees with heights up to sixty feet and trunk diameters up to fourteen inches. These can’t be dug by hand or transported in your pickup truck since the root ball may weigh as much as 3,200 pounds. A special machine called a Vermeer Tree Spade is utilized for these bigger trees. It has three or four huge steel spades mounted opposite each other either in a triangle or square shape, powered by hydraulics. This whole apparatus is mounted on a front-end loader, or on the back of a special truck so that it is mobile. This machine first comes to your house, and with these powered spades digs a hole for the purchased tree, leaving a gaping crater. It returns to the nursery to discard your soil, and opens the cradle to put the digging spades around the tree to be transplanted. It then plunges the blades into the ground hydraulically, and then raises up, with soil ball and tree intact. Some say the tree doesn’t even take notice that it has just left the nursery. Watch the process of planting a huge tree with a hydraulic tree spade The mounted tree spade then travels to your home with the tree in a horizontal position, rolls to the spot with the gaping hole previously dug, and gently puts the new tree in the hole, matching up the soil ball to the cuts in the ground. No change in grade, after watering it looks like the tree has always been there: instant shade. Contact specialty tree nurseries across the state offering this service and large specimen trees. If you plan ahead and follow the advice of these professionals, your trees are more likely to thrive. Successfully planting and nurturing a big tree will bless the next generation and your own as well.