As the title suggests, we’ve had the Terravent out again. I think this is a brilliant tool because it gives us the ability to help trees to help themselves, all with the pull of a lever and unlike most “tree care” solutions it doesn’t rely on a chainsaw!
Anyway, this time a little road trip was called for, all the way to Ruddington near Nottingham. A chap called James who runs the Treecology Tree Team ltd had got in touch on behalf of one of his customers, whose oak tree was surrounded by some incredibly compacted ground.
They’d seen the video from Kew about the work they’d done regarding decompaction and wanted to give it a try.
So off we went. Terravent and GoPro’s loaded and charged and let’s see what we can do.
First off was an attempt at testing which was a complete dead end. The sampler probe wouldn’t pull a plug and the penetrometer tip wouldn’t go in, the ground was simply too dry and too compacted. This is where the terravent comes into its own on tree care projects, as to use an AirSpade would have required a lot of pre-wetting and even then, with the ground being so dry you would never get to any depth and would probably cause damage to the roots with the abrasiveness of the dry soil.
So I started banging away.
In the end, I pushed in around 40 holes and fractured at two depths. The first at about 300mm with the second at around 500mm and injected liquid amendment at both depths. Holes as always were backfilled with activated BioChar and wormcast mix and the client seemed incredibly happy. It wasn’t all sweetness and light though, I managed to bend one probe and with all the bounce back I had to keep nipping the probes up.
But I did manage to get some video and we’ve also been invited to price some more sites for both the terravent and the AirSpade, as well as meeting someone who’s as passionate about tree care as I am.
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