Introducing Our New Mulch Calculating Tool

The purpose of the mulch calculator is to help you figure out how much mulch you need to buy for your mulching project. Mulch is conventionally sold by the yard. When you draw an area on the map it tells you how many yards of mulch are required to cover the area and also gives you some square footage calculations in case that is useful to you. There are some price calculations in there, but it’s really up to you to price shop and get the best deal you can.

How to Grow Fruit Trees

Growing healthy fruit trees can be very rewarding. There is nothing more satisfying than eating something you have grown yourself. However, fruit trees can be very frustrating. If you lose your crop, basket-of-peaches.jpg you miss out for the whole year. There are a number of things to consider when growing fruit trees. Here are some good tips to help you along your way.

site conditions

Ideally, You would want about 7-8 hours of direct morning and mid-day sun with some filtered shade in the afternoon on a well drained site with irrigation. It is rare to Continue reading How to Grow Fruit Trees

Tree Fertilizer Products for the Do It Yourselfer

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Fertilizing trees is a great way to keep trees healthy and is especially important for revitalizing sick trees. I highly recommend you read my four part series on tree fertilizers. You can access them by clicking on the fertilize link under categories on the right sidebar. This article is aimed at pointing you toward a few fertilizer products you can buy to do the job yourself. Some of the tips here will help you with the timing of the right application, but you do need to read the label of the product you are using to make sure you are applying it at the right rate.

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Soil Restructuring. An Important Part of Tree Care.

Soil restructuring is one of the most powerful tools we have for tree health management. The idea is to till the soil; improving its structure will allow valuable air and water to more easily penetrate the soil. While fundamental in gardening theory, this task is not easy at the scale of a large tree.
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Part 4. Tree Fertilizer Products. What to Use.

There are a variety of tree fertilizers out there. Knowing which ones to use can be very confusing. And, to make matters worse, many quality tree friendly products are really “fertilizers” at all. Most of the products in the line I use for my companies treatment programs are alternative products (I don’t like the word “organic,” it is confusing to many and misleading). Here is a list of the products I think are the best:
Continue reading Part 4. Tree Fertilizer Products. What to Use.

Part 3. How to Apply Treatments to Trees

There are a variety of ways to apply tree fertilizers and other treatments. For the average layperson, applications to a tree can be challenging. High pressure sprayers are readily available at equipment rental stores, so you can do it yourself, but this equipment is not easy to use. Accessing a tree’s root system deep in the soil or reaching the upper boundaries of canopy on a mature tree requires this special equipment.
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Tree Fertilizer, Part 2: When to Fertilize Trees

Timing might be the most important factor to successful tree fertilizer applications. Even if you use quality products you can injure a tree by providing the wrong fertilizer at the wrong time of year. I like to describe tree fertilizing by comparing to grass fertilization practices. You can fertilize grass virtually any time of the year with a variety of products and get the same results: greener grass and faster growth. This is because grass is in a constant state of growth (evident by weekly mowing needs). Trees are not in a constant state of growth, so you can’t apply a product at any time. Instead, trees go through a series of growth stages throughout the year.
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Tree Fertilizer Part 1. An Introduction.

Fertilizing your tree will provide a big impact to the health of your tree in both the short term and long term. More than pruning, more than any other tree care service. There is a lot to know about tree fertilizers. This article is meant to be an introduction to tree fertilizer. I highly recommend you read my three other articles in this series: When to Fertilize trees, How to Apply Fertilizers to Trees, and What Products to Use for Fertilizing Trees.
Continue reading Tree Fertilizer Part 1. An Introduction.