The Gel Is Still There in Year Two and the Tree Is Dead
When the gel is still in the pit, the fault is placement, contact, drainage or salt. A five-step post-mortem separating a planting error from a product claim.
Four Hundred Volunteers, Four Thousand Trees: Keeping the Dose Honest
On a 4,000-tree community day, 12 percent of holes got four times the dose and 7 percent got none. Pre-portioned cups, supply runners and a hard stop time.
Will Gel in the Backfill Hurt Mycorrhizal Inoculant?
Polymer gel does not kill mycorrhizal fungi, but a slurry coating on roots delays colonisation by weeks. How to place both products so neither spend is wasted.
Sand Backfill Over Clay: The Perched Water Table You Built Yourself
A sand layer in a clay pit perches water and suffocates roots; gel at the interface seals it further. Four drainage details and a five-minute percolation test.
Gel Below the Rip Line: Placement Depth in Compacted Profiles
Gel dumped at the bottom of an augered hole sits below the layer roots never cross. Matching placement depth to tillage, and why pit walls need scarifying.
Two Crews, 400 Trees, One Day: The Labour Side of Gel Economics
Stopwatch figures for mixing, dipping and scooping gel, costed per tree at 28 an hour. Why the fastest method is not always the cheapest on a large contract.
Planting at 6 °C: How Cold Soil Rewrites the Dose
At 6 °C gel swells four times slower and the root zone stays wet for months. Why late-autumn doses should drop 25 percent and how to pre-swell first.
Crispy Granules and Shrunken Beads: Why Gel Dries Out
Someone digs into a pot or a tree pit six weeks after planting and finds small hard beads, or a crust of what looks like crushed glass, or nothing at all. The verdict comes fast: the gel failed. Sometimes it did. More often the granule behaved exactly as a reversible polymer should, and something in…
