Ken’s Trees

Trident Maple - New Life

Last time you heard from me I was trying to get my Dawn Redwood trees ready to go outside full time last spring.  The first part went smoothly, I followed the schedule and they took the transition with no problems.  However I left everyone hanging for awhile and didn’t even update when I planted my Trident Maples seeds or when they started springing up.  To make a long story short, all my trees were doing great through the summer and then came the fall…

In the fall in the area where I was living the squirls literally go nuts looking for nuts to stock up on for the winter.  This means they become more inquisitive and unfortunately more destructive than usual.  The Dawn Redwoods had no problem dealing with these critters who dug up the dirt in the pots, and knocked off a couple leaves but no major damage (they are strong hearty trees).  On the other hand, the Trident Maples were much to fragile for the evil squirrels.  On one particular day, I came home from work to find every single one of my Trident Maple trees torn out of their pots, some snapped completely in half.

I put all of the trees that I could find back in their pots, even the ones that were snapped in half.  Then brought them back inside where they remained throughout the winter, and continued to water them in hopes that they could spring back.  A couple have kept their leaves throughout this time, but for the most part the leaves slowly died off and I ended up looking at bare sticks for a couple months.  Then yesterday I got back from a ski trip to find that they are all starting to get some new growth!

This has sparked some new life into me, and I have some big projects for the blog coming up.  New seeds are on the way and I’m going bigger than last year.  I made a trip to Lowes today and picked up supplies to get these trees repotted.  There is still a lot of snow up here covering my Dawn Redwoods, but I may even take care of that for a Willard update sooner rather than later.