Watch that over watering, Oliver

Growing up, I loved watching Green Acres (sometimes right after Beverly Hillbillies) during the original broadcast era on CBS.  I felt sorry for Oliver Wendell Holmes, who could never seem to get the farming going well, despite his best and never ending attentions and fairly unlimited funds.  If there wasn't one problem, there was another.  Meanwhile, nobody else seemed to have any trouble, despite lack of funds and hardly paying any attention at all.  Have I mentioned there is a farmhouse near where I live that looks exactly like the one that showed during the credits?  I was singing the theme song to my mother when we bought this house in 1991.

Well here I am now in that role.  The dense clay soil around here is extremely difficult to work with in every way.  Mostly, it doesn't drain anywhere, so water you pour in just sits there forever until it dries out.  But if you don't water during the intense summer heat, you have hard cracking clay that might as well be broken pottery.

Despite the 102 degree heat on Friday, the day after planting, I was shocked to find my moisture meter peaking at several of the new plants Friday night.  It looked to me like the Pomegranate, the tree I love the most, had suffered from that, it appeared to have much more wrinkled leaves than when it was planted, and it's soil seemed to dampest of all.  Poor plant was drowning.  The base was also very loose, and the tree leaning forward slightly, built-in support and all.

So Wednesday night, around 3am, scooped excess loose muddy almost dripping soil off of the root base (the soil had apparently flowed over it at some point) and brought out the black pedestal fan from Lyndhurst, set as low and downward as possible to blow air over the root ball all night and dry it out.

By morning, around 9:30 AM, the soil was looking and measuring better, midway on the meter.  The tree still seems loose but I'm not going to try to fix that.  I removed the fan around 10:15.  Then, taking a picture of all the plants, I decided the Wild Olive was suffering similarly, so I put the an on it.

The problem I believe stemmed from the very uncontrolled watering during planting.  We just let the hose run on each plant until whenever.  I think some plants got barely enough, whereas others got more than an hour of medium hose flow, possibly as much as 60 gallons.  That would be fine with a draining soil, but not with hard clay.  With hard clay, you need to count the gallons.






I brought the