Free guide
How to plant trees that actually live
The tree you buy is maybe twenty percent of the outcome. Site, protection and the first two summers are the other eighty. Here is everything we tell our installation customers.
The four things that kill young trees, in order: grass and weed competition, deer browse, drought in the first two summers, and wet ground. Notice that none of those are about which family you bought.
1. Pick the right site
Full sun. Chestnuts will survive in partial shade and produce almost nothing. If you want nuts, give them open sun.
Drainage is non-negotiable. Chestnuts die in wet feet. If water stands there in spring, do not plant a chestnut there. Slopes, ridges and well-drained loam are ideal. Heavy clay bottoms are not.
Soil pH matters more than most people expect. Chestnuts want slightly acidic soil, roughly 5.5 to 6.5. They struggle badly in high-pH soils, which parts of Iowa definitely have. A cheap soil test before you plant is the single best money you will spend.
Air drainage. Avoid low frost pockets, especially for the European and Japanese hybrid families that leaf out earlier.
Test your drainage before anyone digs. This is the single most useful thing a customer can do to help us, and it costs nothing but a shovel and some patience. Run it in a few different spots where you think trees will go, because drainage can change dramatically across one field.
How to run a percolation test:
- Dig a hole roughly 10 inches square and 10 inches deep.
- Fill it with water and let it sit 24 hours. This saturates the surrounding soil so you are measuring real drainage, not just dry ground soaking up the first pour.
- After 24 hours, pour in one gallon of water.
- Mark the starting water level immediately — a toothpick pushed into the side of the hole at the waterline works well.
- Check at 30, 60 and 90 minutes, and if you can keep going at 2, 3 and 4 hours. Push in a fresh toothpick at the water level every time you check. When you are done you have a row of marks showing exactly how fast it fell, which tells us far more than a single final number.
Roughly what the numbers mean. These are general rules of thumb rather than laboratory figures, but they are close enough to make a good planting decision:
- Drops more than about 4 inches per hour. Sandy and fast. Trees will not drown, but they will dry out. Plan on mulch and real watering the first two summers.
- Drops roughly 1 to 4 inches per hour. This is the sweet spot. Chestnut, hazelnut, pawpaw and fruit are all happy here.
- Drops less than about an inch per hour. Marginal. Do not put chestnut here. Pecan, swamp white oak and persimmon will handle it.
- Still holding water after 4 hours, or the hole was still full at the 24 hour mark. You have a clay pan. Only genuinely wet-tolerant species belong there, and honestly it may be better to plant a few feet away on higher ground.
Send us those numbers and we will tell you what will thrive there, what will struggle, and whether the spot needs a different species entirely. We can run the test for you, but it takes two visits a day apart, so it is difficult to coordinate and we only do it as part of a larger installation plan.
2. Match the species to the spot
Drainage is not one-size-fits-all. Different trees want genuinely different ground, and putting the right species in an imperfect spot beats fighting the site.
- Chestnut. Full sun and good drainage, no compromises. Chestnuts die in wet feet faster than almost anything else we sell.
- Pecan. The one that likes it damp. Pecans want low, moist bottom ground — think beside the wet spot rather than in the middle of it. Not a standing mud puddle, but the ground that stays cool and moist next to one.
- Pawpaw. Happiest on a woods edge or a hilly, broken spot with some shade, which is where it grows naturally. It will do fine in an open field too, it just is not its first choice.
- Fruit trees, hazelnut and most everything else. Good drainage, same as chestnut.
Do not plant into straight clay. Whatever the species, a hole dug in solid clay becomes a bathtub — water runs in, nothing drains out, and the roots sit in it. If that is what you have, move the planting or change the plan.
3. Space them like they will get big
Mature chestnuts are large, spreading trees. For a wildlife planting, 30 to 40 feet apart works well. For an orchard you plan to harvest, roughly 30 feet in the row with wider drive rows so equipment fits. Crowded chestnuts shade each other out and production falls off a cliff.
4. Plant more than one, and plant more than one family
Chestnuts are not reliably self-fertile. A single tree by itself will grow fine and set almost nothing. You need cross pollination from another chestnut within a couple hundred feet, and closer is better.
Plant at least two. Realistically, plant five or more. And mix families, because that spreads disease risk and staggers your nut drop across the fall instead of dumping it all in one week.
5. Plant it correctly
Dig the hole only as deep as the pot it came in — and at least twice as wide, wider if you can. Depth is where people go wrong. A tree planted too deep suffocates slowly. Width is where people give up too early, and width is the part that actually helps.
Break up and soften the soil you dug out, and the sides of the hole too if the ground is tight. You are trying to give new roots somewhere easy to go.
Loosen the roots before the tree goes in. Work them free with your fingers so they point outward instead of continuing to circle. Remove the potting soil they arrived in, or at least most of it — you want the roots meeting your native soil, not sitting in a pocket of different material.
Backfill with the native soil you took out, firm it down, and give it a good watering right away. Do not amend the hole with rich potting mix; it encourages roots to circle inside the hole instead of pushing out into your ground.
6. Protect it before you leave the site
Tree tubes are highly recommended if you want a tree that gets taller than the height animals can damage. A tube goes on the same day the tree goes in, not next weekend — deer in Iowa find a fresh seedling fast.
A tube on a T-post held with steel wire stops browse, stops raccoons, creates a greenhouse effect that speeds early growth, makes it safe to spray around the trunk, and lets you actually find the tree in tall grass next August.
Also worth knowing: some trees attract deer for scraping and rubbing, which will destroy a young trunk even when the deer are not trying to eat it. Protection is not only about browse.
If cattle can reach the tree, a tube is not enough. Cows rub, lean and push. Use a fenced or caged ring wide enough that an animal cannot reach the leader over the top.
7. Kill the grass
This is the step people skip. Grass competes for water far more aggressively than most people realize and it is the leading cause of slow growth and death in young trees. Maintain a weed-free circle at least three feet across around every trunk, using mulch, fabric or careful herbicide application. Do this every year until the tree is well established.
8. Water through the first two summers
Deep, infrequent watering beats a daily sprinkle. Five gallons once a week in a dry stretch does more good than a little every day.
Do not overwater. Drowned roots kill more young trees than drought does, and the symptoms look almost identical — wilting, yellowing, dropping leaves — so people respond by watering more and finish the tree off.
Check before you water. Push a screwdriver or a trowel into the soil near the root ball. If it slides in easily and comes out with damp soil clinging to it, the tree has enough. If it is hard to push in and comes out dry, water it. This one habit will save more trees than anything else on this page.
9. Be patient, then check your work
Expect first nuts around year three to five on the precocious families and year five to seven on the rest, assuming good care. Walk your planting every spring. Check tubes and cages for damage, re-clear the weed circles, and remove tubes once the trunk fills them and the tree is above browse height.
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We deliver, plant, protect, treat the base and map every tree. Central and western Iowa, statewide with travel.