Hello, I'm Jerry Goodspeed, and I'm here at the Ogden Botanical Garden,
and it's about the middle of March. One of the questions we get asked a lot is
how do I transplant a plant or when do I do it?
Now, sometimes what happens is, you've planted the plant in the wrong place, it's
gotten bigger than you thought it was going to get, or any number of things could come
up and you'll want to move the plant. Or you yourself move, and you want to bring
it with you. Well this can be done as long as the plant's relatively small, we like
to say only in the ground about 2 or 3 years, and then you can go ahead and go
move it. The best time to move those plants is when they're dormant.
This can be done in the fall after all the leaves have dropped off, or in the
spring. We like to do it here in the spring before they leaf out.
Here's we've got a yellow twig, or gold twig dogwood that we're going to move.
It's come up in the wrong place or it is in the wrong place rather, and we want to
transplant it from here to the other part of the garden. We love the yellow twigs on
it, it looks very nice, it's very attractive in the winter,
also has some good color in the fall and in the spring. So we're going to move this
plant. And what we're going to try to do is we're going to have to cut some of the
roots, but it's dormant, so it's not going to get too mad at us, maybe a little bit,
and what I like to do is go around the plant, and get about as big as a root ball
as I possibly can, as I'm cutting the roots and slowly move it out of the ground
so as you can see here that I'm just trying to cut the roots, sever the roots,
dig down as far as I can and slowly start to pry this plant out of the ground.
And the good thing about this particular plant is it's pretty hearty. So, it'll do
that pretty well. See we're slowly getting
it out of the ground, and we're going to leave some of the soil on it.
Alright I think we've got all of the roots for the most part.
I'm going to keep it right on my shovel,
I'm gonna make sure we've got them all cut, we don't.
And this will happen, so come over here, cut that last root,
ahh, there we go.
Now we've got the plant, we've cut it out. We've tried to keep-- we've still got a
root down here that doesn't want to break
away.
We're going to make one more cut
there we go
now we're just going to try to move that as best we can, keep a little bit of the
soil.
I'm not real concerned because it's dormant
So it's not growing right now, we've got enough of the roots where it should be
able to establish in the new hole that we plan to place it in.
Okay, so, we've dug the plant, it's a little bit precarious, I haven't got a lot
of soil on it but it'll be okay, it's dormant. We've already dug the hole,
we had that dug first, and, that's kind of important, especially if you only
have one shovel, which we have more then.
But we've dug the hole, and we don't want to put it any deeper than it originally
was, we want it at that same exact level, so we'll just slip it carefully into the
hole, and normally what I like to do is throw a little bit of this soil back in
even before I remove the shovel.
You'll notice that we don't have any fertilizer. There might be a little bit
of organic matter that you can work into the soil that we're putting back around it
so we'll start putting that soil around it I'll carefully pull that shovel out,
throw the rest of the soil in and around it, pack it down.
Again, make sure that that crown is no deeper than it originally was. That's
really important. A lot of people have the tendency to plant plants too deep, and
that's a sure way to kill them.
In fact, that's a really good way to kill them if you really wanted to know.
Okay, we can keep that crown the same, we can see the roots there because there's
some roots coming out there, we're going to create a little area where eventually
we'll be watering it, smooth that out, pack it down really good.
Now, that plant should take off here in about a week or two, starts to warm up
those buds should start to swell, and grow and will establish themselves really good.
Again, this can be done in the fall or the spring. I prefer early in the spring
before they come out of dormancy. One of the reasons if you do it in the fall, they
do have a tendency sometimes to heave out of the ground. In the spring they'll
get some good moisture, they'll establish- I don't prune them at this point, I let
them be, If I need to prune them later I'll come back, any wood that died
out in the middle of the summer at that point I'll prune it out but not now.
I'll just let it be, see how well it establishes on its own.