Your trees and shrubs are a growing investment that should increase in beauty and value with each passing season. But often, landscape plants fail to flourish, and may even go into decline due to lack of proper nourishment. Feeding your trees and shrubs at least once per season is good preventative maintenance. The right diet helps reduce many types of stress that weaken plants. Balanced root feeding, scheduled on a regular basis helps improve and protect your growing landscape investment.
Deep root feeding helps by adding essential nutrients and micro-organisms directly to the root zone. Proper feeding of your plants offers many benefits, including improved flowering, increased resistance to disease, and increased ability to ward off inset attacks. Feeding helps compensate for poor soil or less than ideal planting locations. Liquid formula is injected into the soil surrounding plants to deliver nutrients directly to plant root system. This encourages root cell division and repair. Any remaining nutrients will be available for renewed shoot growth in the spring. Most of the nutrients in fertilizers applied at the surface take a long time to reach the roots of plants. The benefit of deep root feeding is that all nutrients can immediately be used by the tree or shrub being fed.
An experience tree technician knows that you don’t treat problems that aren’t there and instead opt for a preventative overall health approach. Knowing what local soils are deficient in, they mix a specific rate targeted to woody species. By establishing this baseline of nutrients available for plant uptake, any nutrient problems that show themselves later in the season in a particular plant, can more quickly have their source identified and corrected.
The best time to perform deep root feeding on trees and shrubs is in the fall. A plant’s energy shifts down to the root system where root elongation and food storage takes place. As a result, the material is more efficiently absorbed and has the maximum benefit for the plants. At Emerald Lawns, we used Bio-enhanced 10-8-8 all purpose plant food. 10-8-8 is a balanced all-purpose fertilizer that builds a healthy plant, top to bottom. It provides enough nitrogen for steady growth, but it contains more phosphorus and potassium than the 16-4-8, which means better rooting and resistance to fungus and weather stress. Apply monthly during the growing season to established trees or shrubs or use it on the lawn when you want more fertility and less growth.
