Planting Instructions
Step-By-Step Guide

Trees & Shrubs

Step 1: Find the perfect spot and start digging your hole.

Step 2: Do a decent job. Use your legs more than your arms, jump on the shovel like it's a pogo stick, using your weight to ram the blade into the soil. Wear boots, not sneakers, dummy!

Step 3: Measure with shovel to make sure that the hole depth is right.

Step 4: This is your goal. To attain this goal, measure twice with your shovel, cut once, as they say in the carpentry business.

Step 5: This is the end result. LEAVE ALL ROPE, METAL, BURLAP ATTACHED LIKE YOU SEE IT HERE! Cut rope in two months from around the neck of the tree. Put it on your calendar.

Step 6: Untie tree, water it, then watch it grow. Trees planted too deep almost always die. If you get to a boulder, it's ok to plant part of the ball and raise the grade the rest of the way with new top soil that you bring in.

Watering Instructions

What we want to AVOID: bone jarring, plant killing, totally neglected soil moisture. You waited way too long to check/ lighter color, drifts away in the breeze. Death has started on some plant parts

What we want to AVOID: WAY TOO WET- KILLS PLANTS: Water goes between fingers when soil is squeezed. I named this "FREE WATER." When its like this, you are loving your plant to death by watering too much.

Squeezed soil wrings water easily like a sponge. Free water. Don't water new plants with an irrigation system!!! Don't water every day (rare conditions call for this but not with free water in soil)!

PERFECT SOIL: rich and dark in color but squeeze like hell and no free water! If the surrounding soil looks like this you might not have to water.

DO NOT water with this type of sprinkler! Almost no water comes out of the teeny holes. Great for kids to run through, not good enough for plants/trees.

Best way to water larger trees is not to stand there. Place hose at base of tree, turn faucet so it trickles, and leave it there for the appropriate amount of time (summer 2022 I left the hose trickling for 12 hours at two spots for a total of 24 hours per tree for each tree in my yard). Frequency determined by the plant's needs and weather conditions.

​Feeding Instructions
Do you feed your kids? Probably. You should feed your plants too.

Feeding your plants is just as important as watering them. Customers come in all the time asking us why their trees, shrubs, etc are dying. When we ask what they fed with and they say nothing, we have easily found the culprit. Plants need to eat just like us!
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At the nursery, we sell Harrell's as our #1 plant food and fertilizer. We recommend it for every plant whether they're trees, shrubs, annuals, perennials, or even veggies. Over the years, I have come up with the perfect combination of nutrients so that plants get everything they need without giving them too much of anything else. Through this company, we are able to get our fertilizer made for us with a 17-6-12 formula giving us the right amount of nitrogen (17%), phosphorus (6%), and potassium (12%).

This video is a perfect explanation of how to apply the fertilizer to a tree, but it works the same for other plants. It is very important that you spread the mulch away from the base of the tree so that the microbes in the mulch don't get the food instead of the tree.

BEFORE (March)

AFTER (July)

Not only do we sell this fertilizer, we feed everything at the nursery with it. The reason our plants look so good is because we are constantly making sure they have food. If one plant is missed when the others are fed, within weeks in will be obvious that the plant looks a lot worse than the rest. The mint above was repotted and cut down. Now that we've fed it, it will be so happy and come back better than ever.