Did you realize that bad watering habits can do more harm than good to your tree and to your water bill?  Many tree owners are guilty of watering too little and too often.  The rules for watering your tree vary, as they depend largely on many factors such as age and species.  Young trees require a different watering schedule than mature trees.  Palm trees are different than oak trees.  And even different palm species require different capacities of water.  The purpose of this article is to provide you with a general tree watering guideline and to give you a little bit of an insight into how the complex root system works.

HELPING YOUR TREE GET ROOTED

Aside from hydrating your tree to keep it alive, another goal that you should have when you water is help the roots flourish.  Roots of trees and plants go where the water is. As you water, gravity immediately pushes it down into the earth.  The lower it sinks, the less vulnerable it will be to the heat of the sun.  However, if the amount of water that the tree is given is limited, then the moisture stays shallow and quickly evaporates, never giving the deeper soil the chance of retaining any moisture.  When the topmost layer of soil becomes the main area of moisture, then this is where the the roots end up situating themselves in order to drink.  Therefore you are left with a shallow, smaller root system that is more prone to drying out.

Deep watering is always the best way to water your trees.  The root structure of a tree typically stays within the top 12-18 inches of the ground.  Each watering should moisten the top 10 inches of soil, so next time you water, slow down and let that water sink deep.  Be careful though not to drown your tree.  It is important to space out the frequency of your watering sessions, so water has time to be absorbed and to evaporate before the next flood of water comes through.  It is easy to be fooled into thinking that it is time for another watering because the surface soil appears dry, but it is what lies below that matters.  A helpful tool to detect if the ground has enough moisture is to use a simple soil moisture meter.

Watering Young Trees

Newly planted young trees are not capable of storing as much water in their infrastructure like their massive, older counterparts can.  Plus, their root network is condensed in a root ball.  These trees require regular watering for the first 2 years after planting — ranging from three times a week to every couple of weeks, depending on the weather.

Watering Mature Trees

Due to the size of older trees, they are able to store more water, therefore requiring less frequent watering sessions.  And they possess larger root system that can extend well beyond the tree’s canopy.    As a general rule, you should keep the watering zone beneath the branches and avoid watering at the base of the trunk in order to prevent root rot.  Depending on the tree’s location and the weather, some mature trees will never require anything aside of rain water.  Not all of us, however, are lucky enough to live in that type of ideal.  Using a soil moisture meter you can easily determine how often to water your tree.

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