I’ve continued to use sawdust as a tool to nurse unhealthy trees back to health, and to save trees that make it home with a compromised root ball. These two are Jeffrey pines. The first one came with with little to no soil and went straight into an Anderson flat with sawdust.
After nearly a year in the sawdust flat, you can see the root tips coming out of the bottom of the flat. I decided that it needed to move into pumice for the coming year.
Here is the surface after removing some sawdust.
Another photo once all the sawdust was removed from the top.
Once I removed tre entire tree from thew flat, you could see that the root system was growing evernly across all of the finer roots.
The second was in less danger, but I proceeded to do the same as the root ball was a bit sandy and fell apart easily. I also didn’t take good photos of the underside where you can see the majority of the white root tips. The root system was significantly more established going in, and coming out of the sawdust.
I can’t recommend sawdust any more in terms of rescuing sick trees and poorly collected / collection mishap trees. It has an amazing ability to hold significant amounts of water and air at the same time, which helps to give the root system a balance of both water and oxygen which is necessary for root growth.
