[Chrysalis]

Hi aimtobe.

I have a lot of trees. One time I had to transplant a spruce from my mom's place. It was growing in a small area for a full grown tree. We wanted to plant it at my place where there's lots of room for it. The digging went well until I met resistance. No matter what I did, that tree wasn't coming out. I stopped digging and pulling at it. I got an idea to start talking to it so I told it to look around where it is. I said there wasn't enough room for it to grow big and I wanted to take it to another place where it could grow as big and strong as it wanted. Then I grabbed it again and pulled it out with absolutely no resistance. The tree's been at my place for some years and is happily growing.

Perhaps the little tree needs to be told that it's in a place where it can grow to its heart content? And that it's in the best location.

Now for a bit of physical care. When watering trees, remember that it's the feeding roots which take up the water. These roots are by the drip line and a bit further out (away from the leaves). The water that's by the trunk, or even touching it, is useless to the tree. For newly transplanted trees, they're to be watered once a week, every week, unless you get a downpour of rain. You can stop watering once the tree is established. Once established, then stop watering it. Continual watering after that encourages shallow roots which you don't want. They'll go further down into the soil which is best for the tree.

As for pruning, you might want to leave it be for now. We went through several years of draught and an oak tree looked very dead to us. We thought of cutting it down. The top half looked dead and the bottom half had leaves. We decided to leave it alone and when the rain came back, the top half leafed out. This was a big tree so it would've cost a lot of money to have it cut down or even pruned which would've made it look odd.

Don't know if this helped and thanks for reading.