It’s long john season here in California and you aren’t the only one freezing. While you’ve been cozied up to the nearest heater vent your trees have been getting ready for winter.
The first cold snap has come and gone and everything is going dormant, amending your soil this season will allow for the maximum growth and vigor of your trees in the coming spring.
The growing season is the most important time of year to have good nutrient levels in the soil. Urban soils are notoriously sterile due to topsoil removal during construction and regular cleaning of organic debris by landscapers. A little fertilizer and organic fungicide goes a long way towards having full and healthy trees come springtime. A well fed tree is also naturally resistant to pathogens and pests that feed on young green tissues in the spring.
Instead of a regular chemical fertilizer, we use a 100% organic liquid soil amendment. Loading up a tree with nitrogen based fertilizer has only a temporary effect and can overload the soil with harmful salts. We focus on restoring the soil to a more natural state with potassium, kelp extracts, amino acids, and a laundry list of other natural organic materials and root stimulants. To achieve this with regular soil amendments would require excavating and mixing in the amendment by hand, which is expensive, laborious, and ultimately impractical.
Every tree undergoes stress at some point in its life, there really is no way around it. A little stress isn’t a tree killer on its own, but it can open the door for pathogens and pests to establish themselves. Preventative care is the recommended treatment for most fungal and pest problems, once established, many infestations become intractable.
Fungicides are most effective as preventative treatments but it is difficult and costly to apply chemicals to the same trees every few weeks just in case they might get sick. We weren’t happy with this solution and so we found a product that acts in a completely different way than regular chemical fungicides.
Our organic fungicide is actually a concentrated bacterial culture. It establishes itself in the soil and provides a long lasting natural defense against fungi, as well as out-competing many soil borne pathogens, preventing their establishment. Reapplication is only needed if symptoms present themselves or once a year to ensure the size of the bacterial colony is adequate. This approach also increases the effectiveness of chemical fungicides since their absence makes it impossible for local fungi to develop a resistance.
Combining nutrients with sustainable soil bacteria cultures creates a highly effective cocktail for maximizing growth, health, color, strength, and resistance to pathogens and pests.
