Professional Documents
Culture Documents
All over the world tree nurseries use plastic bags (mostly black ones) to
grow tree seedlings. Generally speaking, these seedlings are taken to the
plantation site in their plastic bags, where the bags are cut open and the
root ball is positioned in the planting pit. During that generally rough
handling, the root ball is usually broken and the roots damaged, causing a
lot of difficulties to get the seedlings growing due to transplant shock.
It is well known that many people, after tree planting in the field, do not
take care of those useless pieces of plastic bags, which are then left
(littered) at the planting site. That is one of the reasons why one can find
plastic nursery bags almost everywhere at plantation sites, polluting the
environment (trees are blooming with colored bags).
At the plantation site, plant pits with a diameter of 2-3 times the diameter
of the bottles are prepared. Each bottle is placed close to a plant pit.
With a pair of scissors the lower part of the bottle (e.g. 2,5 cm or 1 inch) is
cut off, leaving the bottom part of the root ball hanging out of the bottle
(again less damage to the root ball than with plastic bags).
After pouring some water in the plant pit, the bottle with its young tree is
placed at the bottom of the plant pit so that the lower part of the root ball
touches the humid soil and the top of the bottle is level with the surface of
the plantation site.
The plant pit is filled with the surrounding soil and some additional water
is poured in the bottle. That water will run through the bottle, where is
makes the root ball completely moistened and the surplus will run into the
local soil, moistening the bottom part of the root ball hanging outside the
bottle.
Thus, the young tree will not get a serious transplant shock and it will
swiftly continue its growth in the local soil, keeping survival rate very high,
even if post-plantation irrigation is difficult or impossible.