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Dip a pound or two of tree food from the bag or pail you carry it in and funnel it down the hole, making sure it reaches the bottom. Don't fill the hole with food to the very top. Leave room for your pile of loose soil, with the divot replanted over it. Tamp down the divot and you would never know your lawn had been punctured. You wouldn't, that is, if your top fillers of loose soil were thick enough. If they weren't, a handsome "cow's tail" of lush grass will rise over each feeding spot. Perfectionists at tree feeding sometimes employ the round "cookie cutter" used to incise putting holes on golf greens. With this tool the turf divot and replacement soil-plug can be controlled precisely. But, as with an earth auger, this technique is tedious and it leaves you with an overage of displaced soil to carry away. The approved pattern for feeding a tree by needle or punch-bar is a series of concentric circles around the trunk, beginning halfway out to the crown's perimeter and extending as far beyond it. Space the circles two feet apart and the insertions along them a like distance. Slant the tool inward toward the tree to increase the food's coverage. Figure five pounds of dry food for each inch of trunk diameter. For trees less than eight inches, halve this ratio. Where obstacles like buildings or pavement limit your pattern, follow it as far as you can, but don't overload it. Professor Stout's objections to the orthodox tree-feeding techniques thus summarized are based on the very simple fact that fertilizer placed on or in the ground can go nowhere but straight down. Aqueous food solutions fed under pressure by needle may diffuse sideways somewhat, but dry deposits put down by punch-bar will only sink vertically as they dissolve. Except where the needle or bar happens, by blind chance, to strike into roots or to stop just above them, the fertilizer misses its mark. |
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