All my potted trees are set to the proper depth in their current pots.

This means, when your plant my trees, the soil level of the pot, should be exactly level with the surrounding soil where you plant it.

Tree roots NEED TO BREATHE. Planting too deep is the number one cause of tree health problems and untimely death!

Recommended Planting Method

Location

#1) Plant in a well-draining spot. If the spot holds water, your tree is likely to get root rot and die.

• Apple trees like slightly acidic soil.
• Semi-dwarfs should be planted about 15′-20′ apart.
• Full size trees should be planted 30′-40′ apart.

Planting Hole

#2) You want WIDE AND SHALLOW. Not narrow and deep.

• I prefer to make a five-foot diameter hole.
  The center of this hole is where the tree goes and should be exactly the depth of the soil in the pot. So for example, from the bottom of the pot, to the top of the soil = eight inches, then the middle of the 5′ hole is going to be 8″ deep. 
• Do NOT loosen up the soil UNDER the center hole. You want the tree roots to sit on firm ground. In our example, the soil 9″ at the center is completely untouched.
• For the remaining area of the five-foot hole, you want the soil as loose as possible. It doesn’t really matter how deep you go, loosening up the soil in your five foot area hole. The more you loosen the soil, the deeper you go, the easier you’re making it for the tree roots to establish themselves.
  An easy method is to dig out the entire five-foot hole about one shovel head length. (Remember, you’re not touching the center of the hole). Throw the dirt into a wheel barrow or pile nearby on the ground.
• You can mix in 25% of good compost / quality soil if your soil is not so great. We have mostly red clay here. You’re NOT looking to load up the soil around the tree with nutrients, what you’re looking for is proper soil TEXTURE.
• Back fill the five-foot hole with the material you dug out, plus any compost mixed in and your hole will be nice and loose! (do not tamp it down!)
• DO NOT FERTILIZE THE TREE AT ALL WHEN PLANTING.
• Make sure the tree is NOT rootbound when you plant.

Creatures

• Protect your tree from the creatures that frequent your area.
• Unless you’re going to use poisons, which I don’t recommend, the only real Vole solution is a metal, hardware cloth barrier around the roots of the tree. This keeps the voles off long enough for the roots to establish themselves and become too hard for voles’ liking. If you know you have a vole problem, this is the way to go. If you don’t think you have voles on your property, you can try planting the trees without any vole protection.
• A hardware cloth barrier extending up around the base of the tree about 12,” about 8-9 inches in diameter, will deter rabbits. There are also a number of different commercial guards you can buy.  I like hardware cloth because it does not hinder airflow or the elements at all.
• Deer are the real tricky ones. You basically have to erect Fort Knox around your tree if you have deer pressure. It sucks, but if deer enter your area do it. The last thing you want is to nurture your apple trees for 3 years only to walk out one morning and find them literally gone… eaten down to the rootstock, never to return again.

Girdling a Tree

• Be sure to remove any tags or wrappings from your tree after planting.
• Keep a physical map of your planted trees somewhere in your house. Tags and markers at the tree get erased by the weather over time.

Root Flare

Every tree I pot, I make sure the “root flare” is level with the soil in the pot. This is why the level of soil in my potted trees often varies a bit, because each root system is different, and sometimes that difference equates to an extra inch or two in the pot.

So, when you DON’T buy a tree from me, that’s set to the proper depth, it’s really important to identify the Root Flare when planting.

The root flare is the point where the top most true roots of the root ball emerge from the trunk. 

In the above picture of an apple rootstock, the flare is easy to spot. A number of main or true roots emerge at the same location at the bottom of the trunk.

In fruit tree root stock, this isn’t always the case, the trunk can extend down with a number of main roots shooting off at different points. When you’re planting a baby bare root tree and you can’t find a distinct flare, plant  to the upper most true root.

Notice in the picture above, there is a sad little dangly root above the flare. YES, that is technically a root, although it’s a bit dry and limp. But small litter Adventitious roots, or little feeder roots like that are not TRUE ROOTS, and you don’t want to plant up to those guys. If you can’t find a flare and plant to the top most little root, you’re almost certainly planting your tree too deep.

In fact, when you plant and those little guys are well above the soil, you want to snip them off.

Root Flares In Nature

In preparation of this article, I went out around my house and took pictures of a few trees. Here are what trees typically look like in the wild.

Obviously, these aren’t fruit trees…

but they are a good illustration of how trees in the wild establish their own root flares… or more importantly, how in nature, a tree’s root flare is NOT buried inches beneath the soil.

While fruit trees grown on rootstock (as the vast majority are indeed grown) are technically clonal reproductions and not quite growing as nature intended, all properly planted fruit trees will establish their own root flares over time.

Take a closer look at the trunks of the apple trees at the Eisenhower Farm Orchard National Park, specifically where the trunks enter the ground.

The distinct flares are clearly evident on all these mature trees.

When your Root Flare is buried:

The roots literally, suffocate. Just a few inches too deep can make a huge difference to roots.

Initial root development of the young tree planted too deep faces reduced water resources from lighter rains… and limited access to shallow nutrients reserves, which are often some of the best nutrients available.

This part gets a little science complicated, but each part of a tree’s bark is formed for a specific environment. The bark up in the air is NOT made to be submerged in wet soil and vice versa. Forcing the wrong bark in the wrong location can easily lead to rot and fungal, bacterial and insect problems.

Perhaps the worst thing about planting too deep, is that burying a root flare is NOT an instant death sentence. You don’t bury your trees root flare, then go back a week later and find the tree laying on its side dead. Instead, the tree struggles for life. Never thriving.

It fights against all the things I just listed, trying its best to overcome all the obstacles it now faces. While they CAN sometimes make it, most of the time, the struggle gets harder and harder each year… and eventually, through secondary diseases or pest infections, the poor tree just throws in the towel.

Box stores and big nurseries are notorious for planting the trees too deep. Even today, something like 80% still plant too deep.

One of the reasons, they do this, is by pumping a deeply buried tree with stimulants/hormones, etc. It promotes more root growth development.

More of those little feeder roots, which give the tree a boost early on… but eventually, and usually fairly quickly, especially when the chemical applications STOP, the deeper roots start to suffer and the little feeder roots CAN’T COMPENSATE.

I compare it very much to the meat chicken industry… you know where they’ve bred the chickens for such extreme weight gain, they grow so fast, many of them die of heart attacks or their bones break. Their bodies just can’t keep up. True story. Scary true story.

This is the same thing when box stores and big nurseries bury the root flares.