Trees are incredibly beneficial to us, and planting a few in your lifetime is a way for you to give back to the environment. However, planting a tree isn’t as simple as just digging a hole and putting a sapling on the ground. You have to take in many crucial factors, and one of them is how to fertilize them.
Whether you have a young sapling or a plethora of established trees, knowing how and when to fertilize them is crucial to their growth. To bolster their health and encourage them to grow, learn how you should approach fertilizing trees with this guide!
When And Why You Should Fertilize Your Trees
It would be best if you began to fertilize them in late April or early May for young trees, saplings, or even older trees. The main reason is that trees get accustomed to receiving a slow release of nutrients at this time.
Fertilizing your trees can help with growth and allow them to strengthen their root systems. This can help them fight off pesky pests and diseases that might come to harm or hinder their growth as well!
Learning About Habitats
What a lot of people take into account when they’re planting trees is usually the natural habitat. When in their natural habitats, they have all the nutrients they require to survive, and they won’t need much special care to grow.
In non-natural habitats, you’re going to need to mimic the environment that it’s supposed to be suited for. This may include adding leaves to decompose so that the soil is just right and other things. However, in both scenarios, you still have to fertilize the soil.
Fertilizing gives your tree that little push and extra nutrients that aid with its growth!
Fertilizing Young Trees
Young trees need a lot more nutrients to survive than a tree that has been standing strong and tall for years. The nitrogen in funerals gets soaked up by the young trees, and that gives them a boost that helps them grow exponentially. The nutrients in the fertilizer also help them grow a canopy in the fall!
When fertilizing young trees, you have to make sure to expand the area you fertilize. As the tree grows, so do their root systems.
When the area around them is well fertilized, the tree’s root system has more nutrients in which they can absorb even in the longer distances!
Determining The Need To Fertilize
Knowing when your trees need to be fertilized is a skill that you naturally hone over time as you grow more and more trees. However, for those of you who still don’t know when a tree needs fertilizer, here are some factors that you should look for when determining the need to fertilize!
- Shorter twig growth
- Dead branches
- Dark leaf veins
- The appearance of yellow, purple, or brown leaves
- Fewer Undersized leaves
These are only some of the factors that you should be looking for. You should take into account if the tree is exposed to lots of stressors.
An example of this is trees that are planted in cities. They are frequently exposed to stress because of the low moisture, compact soil, and nearby construction.
There’s also the fact that they’re most probably sharing soil with other trees in the area. Fertilizing will aid in the reduction of stress, but it will not remove them entirely.
Trees that are frequently exposed to environmental stresses have to be taken care of a lot more meticulously. Watering these trees, pruning them regularly, and fertilizing them will help avoid excess stress and make the burden a lot lighter for them.
Avoiding Over-Fertilization
Trees require nutrients in the soil to live, and soil that is deficient in a nutrient that a tree requires needs fertilizer to help keep the tree from dying. However, you can still over-fertilize them if you don’t test your soil beforehand if it has any nutrient excess.
Over-fertilization can be just as deadly as soil that is deficient in macro and micronutrients. Make sure to check your soil for any excess or deficiencies beforehand and use the appropriate fertilizer to use on your soil. Make sure to check the percentages on the label and fertilize properly!
