Transplanting a bartlett pear tree?

i need advise on a transplanted barlett pear tree. It is about 18 feet tall and had to be moved from where it was originally planted about 2 to 3 years ago. After the transplant it has been watered 2x a day by filling a mote that is around the base of the tree. however the leaves are turning yellow. is that a sign of shock or over watering? Is there a fertilizer or root hermone I should give it? The transplant took place around the end of June. Please advise
Transplanting a bartlett pear tree?
I agree with your previous answers, transplanting should not be done during the summer! Best time is early spring, or late fall. It is very important to get the whole root ball when transplanting. If you cut off too many of the roots, the tree will not make it. On an 18ft tree, I estimate the root ball to be AT LEAST 4 feet in diameter. At this point, your best bet is to wait and see what happens. Watering should be done once every 1-2 days, a SLOW trickle from your hose for an hour or two (that way the water soaks in instead of running off). It is very possible that it is just shock that is making the leaves turn yellow, in which case the tree will grow new leaves this fall or next spring. But, it may also be that not enough of the roots were dug up for transplanting.



If the leaves are yellowing now, they will most likely drop off soon. This does not necessarily mean that the tree is dead. If you snap a small twig from the tree, and the wood inside is still green, then your tree is still alive. Give it a chance to recover. I am a landscaper, and have lot of experiences with transplanting. We put in a lot of trees for a customer last fall, and it was extremely hot out. They all dropped their leaves and looked dead, but by snapping a twig and seeing the green, I knew they were still alive. Sure enough, this spring, they all leafed out beautifully.



GOOD LUCK!



PS, at this point I do not recommend fertilizers, as they will stress the tree even more.
Reply:Transplants should not be attempted until the fall. It's most likley an effect of shock though. I hope this helps! Sorry if it didn't.

:-)
Reply:really transplanting should not be done in the summer only in months ending in er
Reply:If the hole you dug for the tree was big enough and free or rock, it sounds like you're on the right path. However, the same thing happened to me with a bradford pear 3 years ago. I got some Jobe's fetilizer stakes from Lowe's (the directions are on the box) and this saved my tree.....it's definitely worth a shot! Hope it works for you!
Reply:Ouch!



Best to transplant deciduous plants when they are dormant. The problem is that digging anything up -- even when you get most of the root ball -- will do some damage to the roots. The system that plants have is that the root and the top tend to be self balancing. When moved in dormant condition, top growth is usually smaller and stunted for a year or two, as the plant only puts out as many leaves as it can support with its reduced root system.



So now this tree had a balanced root and top. Until you dug it up.....still, I have seen trees survive a transplant mid season. It sounds like the plant is trying to balance itself. If every leaf on the tree is yellowing, this may be a worse sign of stress than if only some of them are yellowing and some leaves are still fairly green. The latter situation would indicate to me that the plant is selectively choosing which leaves to get rid of and which leaves to keep. Usually it will drop the oldest leaves and keep the young ones at the tips in this situation. If this thing has any fruit on it, I would take it off to minimize what it has to support. Plants that are stressed sometimes just try to go to seed before they give up the ghost. You don't want it to sacrifice all the leaves to keep fruit alive.



The watering you are doing is good in the sense you are paying close attention to caring for this thing. If a plant begins to wilt and then stands up after you water it, this is good. Clearly it needed water. If it does not stand up after a watering, it can indicate the opposite. Too much water can do additional damage to root hairs and then the top dries out because the root loses its ability to absorb water properly. So watering twice a day may be exactly what it needs for a while, but be careful not to give water so frequently as to drown it. When you water, don't be afraid to soak it though.



You may want to consider pruning the top. If you were to cut some of the top back, you would be reducing the number of leaves the plant has to hydrate, and that can reduce the overall stress. This would best have been done on the day it was dug up, when you still had pretty much all good leaves to pick from. You didn't mention whether you still have a decent crop of leaves or they were dropping off. If you still have most of your leaves, I would think you could cut back safely 1/3 to 1/2 of what is left. If the plant is dropping a lot of leaves, maybe Nature has done this for you already and it might not be wise to cut off any more. Even if you lose all the leaves on it, it may have enough stored energy to put out another batch. This is usually the case in the spring. In the summer, this tree has already used a lot of its stored energy from last year, for the purpose of producing a crop of leaves and growing new twigs. Once those leaves grow, they can then spend the rest of the summer making carbohydrates out of sunlight for wood growth and which eventually get stored in the tree for the next year. So its a bad time of year to shock it. But, hope for the best and keep a close eye on the watering part. You can also try applying some root stimulator (garden center), it has some hormones and probably phosphorous in it, it could help and it certainly won't hurt. Don't overdo it with the plant food though. Just do your best now to provide it with the proper conditions and hopefully it can pull itself up by its bootstraps -- I have seen it happen! Your chances are good because it has only been there 3 years, probably not long enough to have a root all the way to China. Good luck! :)
White Teeth