Baby rowan

[peds]

Dig a bit of soil out from under a healthy tree, mix it 50/50 with compost, and throw in a handful of chicken pellets too.

[carlos]

On 19/04/2024 at 12:04, peds said:

Leave it where it is for this season, you'd stress it out a bit too much if you tried to move it at this late stage. It'd be easily enough done if you took a decent sized bit of ground with it, but you would set it back a bit. It doesn't look like it's in the way there too much.

 

Build a little barrier around it to protect it from unintended traffic (stones, sticks, etc.), feed it little and often (compost tea once a week or fortnight, or occasional top dressing with chicken manure and seaweed pellets), and make sure it doesn't dry out. Wait until the next dormant season, December to March, and dig it up then, either into a pot or it's intended location. 

 

Where would you like it to live eventually? Depending on the ground you want to put it in, there's nothing stopping you from preparing the soil now. You'd not need to do much if it's moving into an already healthy garden,  but you could think about planting a deep-rooting green manure in the area to add organic material and to mine nutrients from further down in the soil, or you could mulch the area with well-aged and rotted woodchip to encourage fungal networks to develop. New ground or poor soil (former building sites, new estates, reclaimed ground, etc.) would greatly benefit from being inoculated with soil biota from a healthy woodland ecosystem: just steal a shovelful of soil from a decent forest (probably technically illegal, so be a little furtive about it...), mix it about in a few shovels of peat-free compost or aged manure and woodchip, and dig it gently into the top few inches of the intended spot for the rowan.

Seems like a lot of effort to go to now, but it will lay the groundwork for a prime planting location next dormant season. 

seems to like growing in gravel too!!

[peds]

38 minutes ago, carlos said:

seems to like growing in gravel too!!

Yeah, pretty annoying that sort of thing, to be honest. Last place I lived I had a whole pile of raspberry canes, I'd prune them, feed them, try my hardest to keep the snails off them and discourage the birds from eating the fruit, but it was always a battle to get any decent yield. 

But the best, healthiest, most productive plant... a self-seeded unloved bastard child growing from a tiny crack in the tarmac next to the shed. Never fed, never pruned, just working it's way up through the bitumen without a care in the world. 

[Stubby]

Had a small self seeded sycamore growing in a crack on patio stones every year I would strim it off and every year it would grow back .This went on for 5 or 6 years untill it finally gave up .