Bald Cypress group progression

[Maiden69]

Rebagged the collected BC I bought from @Cajunrider . Finished pics tomorrow, I had to leave and it was too dark when I got back. I was able to completely bareroot the tree, there was still plenty of mud in the middle of the tree between the roots and under the trunk. I cleaned the top until I reached a decent location where I was comfortable sawing the bottom with my sawzall. This made the removal of the organic soil a lot easier.

Still plenty of feeder roots near the trunk, a benefit of the root pouch. I combed all the roots straight out, and cut off all crossing roots and roots growing either straight down or up. There are a lot of finer roots between the thick roots creating the flare and also growing from the bottom of them. Hopefully, this will help the tree buttress more during this year.

With the amount of roots that grew this year, I am confident that this will be an annual endeavor until the tree goes into a pot with akadama. The soil I have the tree on surrounding the organic ball was pumice and monto clay. Since it doesn't break down and since the tree will be in water all year long I slightly rinsed it and reused it.

After removing the bag and starting to clean up the top area.



After sawing the bottom and hosing off most of the mud/organic soil off.

 

[Maiden69]

Finished pics.

 

[Maiden69]

Adding update from another thread:

This seedlings are from last year. I bought them from Matt O late winter/early spring and planted them in Rootmaker trays, then placed them on water. I used orchiata mixed with perlite, as my usual soil was too small and fell through the holes of the rootmaker pods. I can say that I will not be using this pods again, they did serve their purpose of allowing the roots to run, but they are too small for what I wanted to accomplish.

Not the greatest of pictures, but you can see the thick roots flaring from the base of a second season seedling. In a Rootpouch the seedling would be much thicker than this, but it will not have the pronounced root division as a tree growing on a swamp or river. A much bigger and round pod would had done a much better job.

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The roots lignified through winter. When I last looked at them early winter, they were all white water roots. I am going to attempt to cut the roots right at the openings of the pods and transfer to a root pouch after dipping them in clonex or dip and grow.

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[Daniel son STL]

I don’t know about the no limit part. When I go to the ponds and lakes, once the water gets above 30” there are no young BC smaller than 8-10” trunk. When it gets to 40” only the old giant trees remain. There are no juvenile trees there. The big ones must have grown there before the water level came up for whatever reason.

For me I just flood the trees to 1-2” below top soil level.

I was looking at bald cypress seedlings growing in 1-2’ high river water just barely poking out the top and asking myself how the hell did these start. Maybe the roots of the parent trees are spitting them out, almost like bamboo or something…