How do I plant walnut trees so they all establish evenly?

Planting looks like the simplest job in orchard establishment. It is not. It is the job where small, repeated mistakes become permanent.

A block where every tree sits at the right depth, with its roots spread and the soil firm against them, grows evenly and comes into crop together. A block planted quickly and carelessly gives you weak trees scattered through it for the rest of the orchard's life — and you will never know exactly why.

Three things decide the result: the condition of the trees, the condition of the soil, and the care taken at each individual tree. Nothing on this page is difficult. All of it is easy to skip when there are eight hundred trees to get in and the light is going.

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When to plant

Plant bare-root trees while they are dormant, before the buds move. The right window depends on your winter, not on a date copied from another country.

• Where winters are mild and the soil stays workable — plant as soon as the trees arrive. Roots begin to establish before the tree leafs out, which gives you a stronger first season.
• Where the soil freezes deeply — wait until the risk of a hard freeze reaching the roots has passed. Frost lifts newly planted trees out of the ground and kills them. Here, early spring is safer than early winter.
• Never plant in midsummer. Heat and sunburn on a young trunk with no established root system cost you trees.

As a guide, growers in mild-winter regions plant from November through to the beginning of March. Use that as a shape, not as a date. It is a mild-winter window, and it is the wrong window for eastern Turkey, the Caucasus or Central Asia. Your own soil temperature, your freezing risk and your soil condition decide the day.

The go/no-go check on planting day

Make this decision before the crew starts, and make it again if the rain, wind or temperature changes during the day. The crew being present is not a reason to plant. Neither is a delivery that has already arrived.

Handling the trees before they go in

A bare-root walnut tree looks tough. It is not. Roots can be damaged by heat, freezing and drying in ways you will not see on planting day but that show up as weak trees, or dead trees, months later.

• On arrival — check the count, the labels, the variety and the condition of the roots before anything else, and write down what you received.
• In storage — cold, moist, shaded and covered. Cold storage is best.
• In transport to the field — keep them covered. A trailer of bare roots in wind and sun for twenty minutes does real damage.
• In the field — release only as many trees as the crew will plant in the next short period. Keep the rest covered and shaded.
• Do not take more trees out of storage than you can plant in one day.
• If planting stops for weather or a breakdown, put the unplanted trees back into protected storage. Do not stand them at the row end and hope.

Let your planting capacity decide how many trees you release — never the other way round.

If you have no cold store

Most growers do not, and it is not a problem. Heel the trees in. Cover the roots temporarily in sand or loose soil and water it enough to keep it moist — once every three to five days is usually enough. Inside a building is best; outside works if the trees are in full shade and never left standing in the sun.

Trees heeled in this way keep for several weeks. It is a genuine holding option, not an emergency measure — but it is still a holding option, and every week costs a little of the tree's reserves. Plant on the day they arrive if you can.

Preparing each planting site

Finish the ground first. Complete your land shaping, build your berms and let them settle before the trees arrive. If you plant and then shape the ground, your planting depth changes afterwards and every tree is wrong. Where drainage is marginal, plant on berms or mounds so the crown sits above the wettest ground. Ploughing, weed clearance and the pre-plant nutrient work all belong to chapter 2, and all of it happens before this page starts.

Four ways to dig the hole

Dig the holes before the trees arrive. Mark the tree positions first — chapter 4 covers spacing and layout — and then choose the method that fits your labour and your budget.

The two auger rows are the reason this table exists. An auger is the practical choice for most blocks and it creates the one defect this chapter cares most about, so plan the remedy in rather than discovering it later.

Size, and breaking the glaze

Dig a hole that fits the roots. Not deeper, not much wider. Deep enough that the roots sit at their natural depth, wide enough that they spread without bending. About 45 to 60 cm wide and 25 to 30 cm deep suits many bare-root walnut trees — but the roots in your hand decide, not the tape measure.

Break up glazed hole walls. After augering, run a shovel or a planting tool around the inside of the hole to roughen the surface. This matters most in clay and in damp soil, where the auger leaves a slick wall. Roughen enough to break the smooth surface, and no more.

Put nothing in the hole except the soil that came out of it. No fertilizer, no manure, no compost. Concentrated material against freshly disturbed roots damages them, and a hole filled with different soil from the block around it behaves differently from every other hole in the orchard. This does not contradict chapter 2, which asks you to correct phosphorus, potassium and zinc before planting: that work is done across the whole field, worked into the soil, weeks earlier. The rule here is about the hole, on the day, at the tree.

Depth and root placement

Plant at the same depth the tree grew in the nursery. Look for the nursery soil mark on the trunk — the line where the soil came to. That line goes at your finished soil level, after settling.

Keep the graft union above the final soil line. Check it after you firm the soil, and check it again after the tree has settled. Checking only before you backfill is not enough — the tree has not finished moving yet.

Spread the roots out in all directions. They should sit naturally: not curling up the side of the hole, not folded at the bottom. A root forced to bend upward makes a J-shape that weakens the tree's anchorage for the rest of its life.

If the roots do not fit, make the hole bigger. Do not fold them in. Cut off broken and dead roots cleanly with a pruning knife before the tree goes in the hole; trim healthy roots only when you genuinely cannot enlarge the hole.

Use a planting board, or a straight bar laid across the hole, to set the depth. Check representative trees against it as you go — not at the end of the day, when the row is already backfilled.

Backfill and watering in

Use the soil that came out of the hole. One person holds the tree upright and at the right height; the other returns the soil in stages, firming with hands or feet as they go, so that no air pockets are left — especially underneath the roots, where gaps are easy to miss and impossible to fix afterwards. Firm around the roots without compacting the whole root zone.

Finish with a slight mound where you expect settling, keeping the nursery mark and the graft union in the right place. Do not leave a permanent basin around the trunk. Water should reach the roots and then move away, not sit against the crown — and if you are planting in winter, shape the soil so that rain cannot collect at the base of the tree.

Water every tree immediately after backfilling. This water is there to settle the soil against the roots and collapse the remaining air pockets. It is not there to fill the hole. About 5 to 10 litres per tree does the job; on sandy soil you may need up to 20. Give enough to settle the backfill, then check that water is not standing.

That rule is worth the whole section. A dormant tree is not photosynthesising and is not using water, and watering it fills the air spaces in the soil that its roots need to breathe. Wait until the tree begins to leaf out, and then until the root zone actually starts to dry, before you water again. A newly planted tree has a very small root system and uses very little water.

More trees are lost in the first year to constantly wet soil around the crown than to drought. Check the moisture where the roots actually are: make a small auger hole beside a representative tree and look at the soil, or use moisture sensors. Do not judge from the surface, and do not water on a fixed calendar. Chapter 6 covers scheduling once the trees are growing.

Stakes, ties and protection

Stake where wind, soft new wood or your training system needs it — not everywhere by default. If your site does not get strong winds, staking is not necessary.

Where you do stake, put the stake on the side the wind comes from, about 20 to 30 cm from the trunk, so that it shelters the tree and the tree is blown away from it rather than against it. Use a loose, adjustable tie of soft material — cotton or elastic. The tree should be able to move a little, because that movement is what builds trunk strength, but it should not whip or bend over. Keep the tie and the stake clear of the graft union and the new shoots.

Protecting the trunk

Protect against what your block actually has, not against a generic list.

In hot, dry regions, and anywhere water is short, mulch is worth the effort. It cuts evaporation from the soil around a tree that has almost no root system to draw on. Keep it back from the trunk itself — mulch banked against bark holds moisture where you least want it. Chapter 9 covers the orchard floor from the second season onward.

Pruning at planting

With a good finished tree, consider leaving it unheaded rather than automatically cutting it back to a few buds above the graft union. There is experimental support for this: trials comparing headed and unheaded trees found no long-term height advantage from heading, and the unheaded trees grew as well or better. They also grow more slowly in the first weeks, which means they bend less in the wind.

Protect the exposed trunk from sunburn. An unheaded tree carries more bare trunk into its first summer than a headed one does. Paint it, or fit a trunk guard.

Decide your training system before planting day, and write the cut down. A crew making individual judgements down the row is how a block ends up with mixed architecture, and heading the tree on the day commits the whole block to a headed, scaffold-based orchard. Chapter 7 sets out both systems and the full year-by-year work; this page is only the first cut of it.

Watch: planting, step by step

Everything above is a set of rules. This is the whole job done once, at normal speed, on our own ground — the hole, the roots going in, the backfill, the firming and the first water.

The first weeks

The first few weeks tell you whether your planting operation actually worked. Check by zone and by crew, not by walking down the middle of the block.

Before the crew leaves each row

• Final depth, and the graft union above the soil line.
• Soil genuinely wet around the roots after watering in.
• Stakes, ties and guards fitted.
• Tree count matching.

Fix problems now, while the soil is still workable and the crew is still standing there.

At the first irrigation

• Emitter output and pressure at row ends and on high ground, not only in the middle.
• The wetted zone under representative trees.
• Anywhere water is standing.

Repair system faults immediately, and set run times from what you see in the soil rather than from a plan on paper.

Weekly through the first season

• Bud break and shoot growth.
• Wilting or yellowing leaves.
• Frost or sunburn damage.
• Animal damage, herbicide injury, machinery injury.
• Weeds growing in the wetted zone, where the tree's roots are.

Before you replace a dead tree, find out why it died. Replanting into the same deep, glazed, waterlogged or badly watered position simply repeats the loss. Correct the cause first, then replace. Keep a record of which trees are replacements, so that their smaller size in three years' time does not confuse your view of how the block is performing.

Mistakes worth avoiding

• Planting too deep. The most common mistake, and it cannot be undone. Use a planting board and check again after watering in.
• Letting roots dry, freeze or overheat. The damage is invisible on the day and shows up as missing trees months later.
• Bending roots to fit the hole. Enlarge the hole instead. A J-rooted tree never anchors properly.
• Planting into wet soil. Smeared hole walls and poor soil contact. Wait for the soil.
• Holding the tree up while someone shovels underneath. Loose soil settles and takes the tree down with it. Firm the bottom first.
• Leaving air pockets under the roots. Backfill in stages, firm as you go, then pull on the tree.
• Watering on a fixed schedule. Young roots occupy a tiny volume of soil. No leaf, no water.
• Standing water around the crown. Water in to settle the soil, then stop. If water sits, you have a drainage problem, not a watering problem.
• Fertilizer or compost in the planting hole. Feed the field before planting, never the hole.
• Tight ties and forgotten guards. Both girdle trunks. Both are prevented by one inspection round.
• One planting cut applied to every tree without a plan. Decide the training system first.
• Planting because the trees arrived. If the soil is not ready, stop. Store the trees properly and wait.

Before you start

Tell us when you plan to plant and we will schedule your delivery to match. And if you would like someone to look over the plan first — your soil, your irrigation, your timing — send us the details and we will go through it with you before the trees are on a lorry.