Reading in a book about organic apple orcharding about a pre-planting root treatment of endomycorrhizal inoculant i.e. Glomus aggregatum, G. clarum, G. deserticola, G. intraradices, G. monosporus, G. mosseae, Gigaspora margarita, and Paraglomus brasilianum. Has anyone experience with this? Recommend or not? We've Liberty and Chehalis apples and Rescue and Chojuro pears coming from HOS in spring. Thanks.
I'm far from an expert, but I've been using a combo ecto/endo treatment on all of my bareroot trees/shrubs for about 8 years. The mix I use is added to some water absorbing gel so you get a rootdip to help your stock through any dry times as well as the endo/ecto. I buy the combo because I use it on various hardwood trees and shrubs as well as evergreens. Just easier for me to have the combo around.
I'm guessing in the NW the dry times may be far fewer than here in the midwest?
In the west side of the Cascades in the PAC NW (where all the people live), the wet times are different. YOur summers are much wetter than ours. Ours are very dry. Your winters are snowy, ours are rainy.
I use a different combination to try to encourage healthy fungal growth. I plant with old wood. I mulch with chipped wood and I do a lot of chop and drop. I disperse both compost and compost tea as seed for the mulch. Then I use compost tea (both fungal-oriented and bacterial oriented) to encourage the fungal good guys. It is not as specific an inoculant, but I base it on the idea that the tree will exude about 1/6 of its energy into the roots to encourage forms of fungal and bacterial growth, which will in turn encourage other forms of healthy microbiology. Works for me.
John S
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John - I've always liked adding any rotting wood to planting holes while doing woodland plantings too. I figure it helps with moisture retention as well as with nutrients.
If you do have dry summers, the water absorbing gel could be a Godsend. I won't plant a tree/shrub/bush/whatever without doing a root slurry on it (assuming bareroot stock). I also add about 1/2 to 2/3 cup of the gel in the dry powder form to the planting holes of my fruit trees. Most of my fruit trees are for the critters, but I enjoy eating some of them too. I bring this up because my trees are planted in a "wild" setting. I plant them and basically leave them be. I do protect the trunks with window screening and with 5.5' diameter 5' high wire cages. I prune most of them annually and hit them with spray maybe 2-3 times a year if needed. That's it.
I plant on two different chunks of ground. Here at home I have some beautiful, fertile silt loam. Easy to grow stuff here. On the other site I have extremely infertile, sandy acidic stuff. Very difficult to grow stuff there. That's where the water absorbing gel really shines. Without it, I know I'd lose my trees. I cannot give them supplemental water. With the gel, I haven't needed to do so. Of course adding a few lbs. of pelletized lime and 100 lbs. of humus to each planting hole doesn't hurt anything either. 
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Would you call the wood mulch you use ramial?
As smsmith said, I put old rotten wood in the hole. You can sometimes even see white threads of fungal growth on them, which is used by woody plants, like trees to grow. One word of caution, though-I notice worms/maggots /borers in some old wood I had, so I killed them and didn't plant that wood in a fruit tree hole. I often crunch up the wood that I do put in the hole so it is mixed in with the soil.
We have clay soil, so it doesn't dry out that much. Old wood is much more porous than green wood, so it fills up with moisture to a certain extent, and then drains well. It helps to have something like that in the soil during our hot dry summers. I often plant in fall so the roots have a long time with cool moist temperatures before it actually gets hot in June/July.
I don't know what ramial means but I love learning about this stuff. What does it mean?
John S
PDX OR
Ramial is simply ground up (shredded/chipped) green wood. If you have a bunch of brushy stuff (living) to get rid of - rent a chipper for a day and chip that stuff up. Use it as a top dressing around the drip line of your fruit trees, or better yet incorporate it into the top 1-6" of soil with a rototiller or disk. Obviously you'd only be able to do the latter on an area that you have prepared well in advance and an area that's large enough to use some type of hand or machine operated equipment.
If you Google ramial there is some very good research and reading out there.
I learned about the stuff from a guy on another forum I frequent. He posts here from time to time as well.
I do use that. I just didn't know it was called Ramial. We got a chipper when we first moved in here, and we use it as mulch. I often will put that stuff on top of many layers of newspaper under a fruit tree or bush, to discourage grass and keep the nutrients for the tree bush. The mulch also provides a food source for the soil food web. We also get the stuff from arborist companies. Trees grow real fast out here, and people are always having trees removed/chopped and the companies have to get rid of the chipped wood.
I don't till because it kills and damages the soil food web.
In the long run, these mulches contribute to well draining soil that is fertile and has a lot of active nutrient microbial life, which is what I want.
John S
PDX OR
[quote="Bethanye":23v90s6l]Interesting variation on the conventional wisdom; i.e., backfill with nothing but native dirt.[/quote:23v90s6l]
Here at home my preference is to use nothing but native dirt and maybe 1/4 cup of water absorbing gel scattered around the circumference of the planting hole.
Up north on my sandy, acidic soil I'd lose every tree if I didn't backfill with some improved soil and quite a bit of water absorbing gel. I also put a couple lbs. of pelletized lime and triple 10 or 13 under the dripline of those trees every year. I mulch them with newspaper and/or cardboard, then use heavy duty UV resistant landscape cloth. My survival rate is about 90%. Before I went this route my survival rate was about 10%.
If I could provide these trees with weekly supplemental water it would be a different story. Since I can't, my options are limited.
Some advocate native dirt, but these are not native plants. I tried native dirt with my cherry trees and unimproved drainage. They died in the rain of winter. I don't consider that a successful planting.
On the other hand,I do think that one can easily overimprove the soil, so that the roots don't want to leave the perfect soil in which you planted them. A round hole in clay, unconnected to other soil is a clay pot. The roots will likely circle and strangle the plant.
I usually make a triangular shaped hole, and partially improve the soil, mainly for drainage, with no additional fertilizer at planting. I lead the roots out toward the points. I dug up many trees when I moved and they were very healthy. Old wood acts like a sponge. It soaks up water to help during the hot dry summer. It also drains well as it can hold only so much water. It has had time to convert closer to soil than a green tree. In the forest, many trees grow up in nurse logs, so it must be a healthy way to go. What do fungi grow in naturally? Old wood. It's what trees need.
John S
PDXOR
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