A New Possumhaw Holly Tree

We planted a Possumhaw Holly tree back in October 2023. But after 3 years, it had made no improvement in size or development.  

 

 

And Linda found a new Possumhaw Holly at a sale at the Wildflower Center, so we decided to give up on the old one and replace it with the new one.

 

But we wanted to make sure that there were no problems with the new tree having a good home.  Maybe the old tree just couldn't grow in it's spot.  This is in one end of the Jungle, and when we put it in we had just removed all the Nandina and  put down black plastic and mulch everywhere to prevent it from growing back (which seems to have worked).

So first we pulled out the old tree, pulled back the mulch and removed the black plastic from this end of the Jungle (seems a misnomer at this point). 

 We had cleared out a spot for the old tree, but not being certain how far down we went, or how far out, we decided to excavate out the entire exposed area, going down as far as we can.  We started by trenching from the center, where the old tree was out to one edge of the bed, down as far as bedrock.

 Then we enlarged that trench sideways, taking out all the dirt to expose the bedrock layer of rock.

 Although it looks to be bedrock, in reality it is several layers of sedimentary limestone with thin dirt layers between, so we could get down another 6 to 8 inches by taking out all that rock.

 That got us to 22 to 26 inches of depth (from the top of the limestone border wall.  Given that the Possumhaw Holly is a type of Yaupon Holly and is native to Texas, we figured that should be good enough.  It's really more of a bush or shrub than a tree anyway.

So we then expanded the excavated area towards the other side of the bed.

 And continued pulling out the rocks, to clear the entire bed down to real bedrock

 Then we  redistributed the saved dirt back into the hole,

 Of course, having removed a substantial amount of rock from the bed, we needed to bring in more dirt. 

 And more dirt.  Eventually we bought 35 bags of enriched topsoil, each 2 cubic feet, at about $4 a bag.  Then we topped it off with 8 bags of hardwood mulch ($31.78).