wireme
Masterpiece
Greetings, here's a survivor of the early freeze event I mentioned in my intro post, turns out rmjs seem to be pretty tough, for this one the huge box probably helped too.
This one came out of the rocks with an absurdly large rootball, just very slightly smaller than the size of the rootmass in the pics below. I could barely pick it up but somehow managed to stagger down cliffsides, through dense brush and down talus slopes to my car.
The rootball was an incredibly dense mixture of decayed organic matter and fibrous roots, pretty much like a solid block of felt. I tried to loosen it up before potting but any attempts to open the rootball up resulted in tearing of all the surrounding roots. It was impossible to decipher where the roots began or ended or even which direction lead back to the tree. The only option to loosen the rootball would have been sawing into it somewhere but you never know if you might hit a major root and sever the line to who knows how many feeder roots.
So leaving it as a giant felt block I planted it into a large box with about an inch or room either side. The growing medium was mostly smallish particle size granite grit. I used a smaller than usual particle size because I was a bit worried about too frequent waterings leading to root death within the large original soil mass. The outer new soil was watered well about twice a week in warm weather and the whole thing watered every 2 weeks or so. It's been in the box for 3 or 4 growing seasons now.
The tree did ok with this treatment, not the vigour of a well established RMJ in good free draining soil but a bit more vigour than it would typically have in the mountains.
Here's a look at what I found when I pulled the sides of the box off, I'll continue the story from here.
This one came out of the rocks with an absurdly large rootball, just very slightly smaller than the size of the rootmass in the pics below. I could barely pick it up but somehow managed to stagger down cliffsides, through dense brush and down talus slopes to my car.
The rootball was an incredibly dense mixture of decayed organic matter and fibrous roots, pretty much like a solid block of felt. I tried to loosen it up before potting but any attempts to open the rootball up resulted in tearing of all the surrounding roots. It was impossible to decipher where the roots began or ended or even which direction lead back to the tree. The only option to loosen the rootball would have been sawing into it somewhere but you never know if you might hit a major root and sever the line to who knows how many feeder roots.
So leaving it as a giant felt block I planted it into a large box with about an inch or room either side. The growing medium was mostly smallish particle size granite grit. I used a smaller than usual particle size because I was a bit worried about too frequent waterings leading to root death within the large original soil mass. The outer new soil was watered well about twice a week in warm weather and the whole thing watered every 2 weeks or so. It's been in the box for 3 or 4 growing seasons now.
The tree did ok with this treatment, not the vigour of a well established RMJ in good free draining soil but a bit more vigour than it would typically have in the mountains.
Here's a look at what I found when I pulled the sides of the box off, I'll continue the story from here.
