HI there, I'm Christy Wilhelmi with Gardenerd, and it's Wilhelmi like Will help me without
the 'P'.
Somebody wrote a comment once on YouTube saying, "slow down so we can understand what your
name is."
So that's what it is, it's Christy Wilhelmi.
Today I'm going to address a common problem that you've probably encountered at least
once in your gardening life.
And that's when you go to the nursery and you buy a plant or a fruit tree, in this case
this Fuji apple tree, and you bring it home and you don't quite have a pot that's big
enough for it.
You don't quite have a place in the ground to put it yet.
So you put it in a temporary pot and it's too small.
And what happens is you forget about it over time and suddenly this happens.
The roots grow through the drainage hole, blocking the drainage hole, and suddenly you
have flooding.
And this is what we have to do in the rain to bail out the tree every time it rains.
And you might notice that this tree has lost all of its leaves.
It is dying and we're going to fix this problem.
So what we're going to do is dig this gently out of the ground, because the roots have
established themselves underground, under the pot.
We're going to break the pot, and dig a hole, and plant it in its proper place.
So stick around, let's see how that works out.
Scrape the mulch away as best you can, and then loosen all of the soil around the plant
without hitting the beautiful volunteer tomato that is growing in there.
Basically I'm trying to loosen the soil as much as possible without breaking that big
root that has gone through the drainage hole.
This is tricky because I might.
But if all goes according to plan, we're just going to loosen things and not not kill the
thing.
It's a very tight squeeze back here, so it's hard to get in.
And I'm stomping all over my mint.
Ah, this might be it.
I keep hurting myself, I keep slamming my hand against the wall.
So the tree I feel it moving a little bit.
It's still in there.
It's hard to tell if we got it.
Yep, there it is.
So we got a good portion of this root here.
There is another part over on this edge that I need to get to.
Ah, I broke something.
Just keep digging.
There it is.
We've gotten underneath it.
I just don't have enough room to use the leverage I have, because it keeps hitting the wall.
Lesson #1, don't plant your fruit trees too close to the wall, or put them in pots too
close to the wall.
All right, I think we got it.
I think it is now loose.
Let's take a look.
Hi bee.
He's investigating me.
Okay [squeals], geez, I just got bit.
I mean I just got stung.
Yea, I did.
I got stung in the nose.
He's in my hair.
Yes, he's in my hair.
Get him out.
I have a stinger in my nose.
He's in my hair.
Can you turn off the camera, please?
Ooh, I'm in the hole.
That was a bad idea.
This was a really bad idea.
Okay so right now we're going to tip this pot over.
We've brought it away from where it is, we're draining all that excess water out, which
is good.
And see how this came through the bottom?
There's just no way this tree will survive on its own.
And it may be challenging for us to even get this pot off.
Here we go.
Start by pulling these pieces off.
Oh, and that smells very anaerobic.
So it's been without oxygen for awhile now.
And it's going to suffer because of it.
And you can see how we're going to have to get in here.
And hope I can get this part.
Yay, okay good that came off very easily.
I've done this with plastic pots and it has not been as easy because the plastic, you
have to cut it away and if you get too close to the root, you end up losing it altogether.
So now, we can break up this part of the root ball a little bit.
Maybe with some shears.
It's so garbage smelly it's pretty bad.
I want to cut some of these away just to give the roots a new direction.
Poor tree, poor little tree.
So now we're going to dig a proper hole for this and bury it again.
All right so at this point, we don't usually add too much amendment to existing soil.
We want trees including fruit trees to grow in existing and native soil pretty much, but
we're going to give it a little bit of compost so that it drains well, since it's been water
logged for so long.
I'm going to take a little bit, we've widened this hole a bit.
And gotten any of the extraneous roots.
We've roughed up any smooth sides of the hole.
So I'm just putting in a few handfuls here and there.
That should do it.
Mix it up well.
So Andrew is going to drop the tree in the hole properly.
Upright and oriented with the trunk as straight up as possible.
That's good.
It's really stinky.
It's very anaerobic.
We want that first root flare exposed, which is back here.
So there you have it.
It's a bit of an ordeal, but you can save a poor little tree that's been suffocating
and suffering in too small a shoe.
Just take care to take care of those roots.
Give it enough room to grow, and water with kelp emulsion after you transplant it to help
ease transplant shock.
For more information on how to grow food, and transplant crazy trees and all kinds of
stuff go to Gardenerd.com.
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Happy Gardening!