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Best time to move plants

Wiltshire, United Kingdom

I have lots of honeysuckle and a couple of young climbing roses that I need to move, when is the best time to do this and does anyone have any tips to 'ensure' the move is a success? Thanks everyone.




Answers

 

Autumn or early spring is best, the time when the plants are dormant.

In general, make sure you have as big a rootball as you can. Prepare the site where they are moving to before digging them up.
Make sure the new sites hole is well dug and if necessary add some slow release fertiliser and fork it in rather than just chucking it into the hole.
Prune and jagged/broken roots leaving a nice clean cut.

Watering is the key, even if you do it late autumn. Just dont water if its due to be frosty as the water will freeze, and also dont move if the soil is frozen.

You could do it now, but you would have to prune down the plants and then transplant them asap.
Moving now- as its summer (although its more like October!), the plants will benefit from a lot of water, for weeks/months if the weather warms up, enough so it can penetrate deep into the soil and settle in the rootball, rather than splashing it around.

They will probably sulk now but will recover if some of the foliage is pruned away, 'root to shoot ratio'!

19 Jul, 2009

 

September/October is the best time, while the plants are dormant or dying back. Do it when the soil is already moist - in the case of the roses, you will find they may have put down a particularly long root or two into the soil, so don't expect to just scoop them out (though you might be lucky, if they've not been in long). You must dig round the base of the plants you want to move, in the case of honeysuckle, at least a foot out from the centre of the plant, all round, loosen, put a garden fork underneath and try to lift - if it doesn't come up, excavate soil until you can see where the roots are growing - remove more soil and loosen the roots keeping it in place. Try to keep as much of the central rootball intact as you can. Make sure the planting hole you make to take the newly dug up plants is big enough, in terms of width and depth, to accommodate all the odd shapes you'll have where roots stick out at at odd angles, and is deep enough so that its buried up to where it was buried before. Place in hole, backfill with soil, tread down lightly. For the honeysuckle, if they're pretty old, don't bother trying to move them, you'll never do it, and you can cut down top growth to make it easier to move to about a foot or two if they've not been in the ground too long. Doing this means you may lose some flowers next year, though.
I'd incorporate Fish, Blood and Bone into the new planting areas, but NOT nitrogenous feed, like Growmore or similar.

19 Jul, 2009

 

I posted my answer at the same time as you Nicky!

19 Jul, 2009

 

Easily done! But atleast the advice is similar and weve boh covered different things and not completely opposite!

19 Jul, 2009

How do I say thanks?

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