The Effect of Backfill Soil Texture and Planting Hole Shape on Root Regeneration of Transplanted Green Ash

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Figure 1.
Diagram of the three planting hole configurations used. Larger hole designs were intended to provide a larger volume of quality backfill soil while minimizing effort required to dig them and also to eliminate the veritical wall which could trap roots in the whole if they were not sucessful in penetrating the compacted site soil.
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Figure 2.
Roots grew readily from the backfill soil into the compacted site-soil without any apparent interface restriction.

Table 1.

Green ash root densities in backfill (BF) and compacted clay topsoil (CL) samples

Hole	Backfill	15 wks after planting				57 wks after planting
		15 cm¹		30 cm		15 cm		60 cm
		BF	CL	BF	CL	BF	CL	BF	CL
1.2X	unamended	1.9	1.7	0.4	0.6	5.9	4.3	5.8	2.9
1.2X	amended	4.4	0.5	1.2	0.3	7.2	3.4*	4.5	2.4
1.2X	topsoil	3.5	1.9	1.0	0.3	6.9	5.3	6.7	3.1*
2X	unamended	3.0	0.5	2.0	0.3	6.7	4.2*	4.3	2.5
2X	amended	3.1	1.8	0.8	0.5	5.9	3..3*	5.7	3.7
2X	topsoil	2.2	1.0	1.5	0.4	6.7	4.3	5.9	3.0
3X	unamended	2.4	1.0	0.8	0.3	6.9	5.0	4.3	1.8*
3X	amended	1.9	1.8	1.4	0.3	5.3	4.2	3.8	2.2
3X	topsoil	1.8	0.9	0.9	0.7	4.3	3.5	5.7	2.4*

↵¹Distance from the root ball
↵*Significant difference between backfill soil and clay subsoil at the same location and sampling date at the 5 percent level using two-tailed T-test. There were no significant differences among the data in each column using Newman-Keuls test for mean separation at the 5 percent level.

Table 2.

Terminal growth and trunk diameter increase of green ash following transplanting.

Hole	Backfill	Terminal growth					Trunk diameter increase 88-90
Hole	Backfill	1987	1988	1989	1990	88-90	Trunk diameter increase 88-90
1.2X	unamended	26.6	1.9	3.0	28.1	32.9	2.24
1.2X	amended	30.3	2.4	1.8	39.3	43.5	2.04
1.2X	topsoil	27.1	1.8	1.9	26.8	32.2	1.98
2X	unamended	19.6	1.6	2.4	29.9	33.9	1.96
2X	amended	24.9	2.5	2.6	38.1	43.3	1.96
2X	topsoil	26.2	3.3	2.1	28.3	33.7	1.96
3X	unamended	24.7	2.5	2.3	32.2	36.9	2.14
3X	amended	24.1	2.6	1.9	20.1	24.7	2.18
3X	topsoil	24.1	1.9	3.1	32.8	37.8	2.08

There were no significant differences among treatments for any column using Newman-Keuls test for analysis of maan separation.at the 5 percentlevel.