We plant and sell a lot of bare-root walnuts in the winter and consequently have lots of experience of getting things right and wrong.
This year I had some Tulare left over (I always have to guestimate how many trees to order in November!) and although they were heeled in I ignored them until the end of March at which point I realised they hadn’t been watered, as it had rained a fair bit I didn’t consider that the roots underground were probably dry from mounding up, basic error.
Bare-root transplants are always in shock to some degree or other and leaving the weather to care for them is a major risk, normally they should be kept damp and once planted irrigated regularly. This is especially true in our modern British climate, we rarely have consistent rainfall and certainly not even enough to percolate 8-12” down into the soil, on our heavy clay in old pasture even and inch of rain in 24 hours will only percolate down a little way, especially if the soil has been dug and firmed down.
The images below show the state of the Tulare in a nursery bed and the difference between one that had sufficient moisture and two others that didn’t, shock has caused a lot of die back both below and above the graft union, rub off the ones below and keep the trees mulched and watered and it’ll catch up pretty quickly.
This kind of die back is how I know I’ve got the irrigation wrong early in the year in our orchards, drip irrigation is a life saver but it’s quite difficult to judge the moisture available even in parts of the field, let alone at each individual tree.
