每日家庭整修技巧

Today we digress from our usually home renovation focus to remind you to feed the trees on the outside of your house.

Trees are environmentally friendly. They provide shade to help cool your house or protect your lawn. And, home renovation tasks can include home maintenance tasks both inside and outside the house, right?

However, I am always amazed by the number of home owners who will spend lots and lots of  money to take care of their lawn yet forget about their trees. Trees need food just as much as your lawn and flowers and shrubs. No, fertilizing your lawn does not provide the type of food that trees need.

After three years living on the street in our prior home, why was the tree in the front yard that was planted by the city the largest on the block? It was the same tree that everyone else received (it was a new sub-division). I could, possibly, have something to do with us being the only one to consistently, if at all, used tree spikes to fertilize our tree? I think so.

It’s not hard. You can get tree fertilizer spikes at any garden center. Ours came 5 to a package. 

When I first starting using these I made the mistake of not ensuring that the ground beneath the lawn was sufficiently moist. A dry, hard ground will cause the fertilizer tree spikes to crumble and then cause fertilizer burn on your grass. So, if you are not sure whether the ground under your lawn is sufficiently moist, water your lawn first.

Then simply place the plastic cap that comes in the package on the flat end of one spike. Next, find the ‘drip line’ and place the tree fertilizer spike on the drip line. The drip line is the area of the ground beneath the tree above which is the end of the tree branches. Apparently the tree roots tend to go out only as far as the branches. Who knew? If you closely in the picture below, towards the lower left is where we have the tree fertilizer spike package where we feel the drip line is for that area of the tree.

Follow this by using a hammer to gently push the fertilizer tree spike into the ground.

Once the top of the fertilizer tree spike is at ground level, remove the plastic cap and continue to use the hammer until the top of the spike is 2 inches beneath the soil.

Repeat the process for how ever many tree fertilizer spikes you will use. Your package will tell you how many to use depending on the size of your tree. In the tree pictured in the above pictures I used all 5.

And that’s it.  Repeat two or three times during the year.

Simple.

Your tree will thank you by becoming the biggest and bushiest and prettiest on the block!