Trees, Shrubs and Conifers: Massacred Malus, 1 by runktrun

runktrun wrote:
Alright I admit it I am a girly girl who often cares more about how pretty my garden looks than I am concerned with the study of plants. So when weeks turned into months this past winter and trun my husband still hadn’t found time to help me transplant my nearly twenty year old dwarf Malus - Crabapple to a location in my front entry garden where it could be a shining star, I pulled a Tom Sawyer on a girl friend and together we first butchered this dwarf tree’s root system then dragged it to its new location. A few weeks later it flowered heavily without a hitch followed by the appearance of apples and leaves, but the apples remained the size of a pin head and the leaves were dwarfed as well. After a few weeks of this frozen growth new leaves of normal size have sparsely begun to appear. The tree has irrigation and good light conditions but I feel as though I need to encourage and support new root growth so it survives the winter of 08/09. Would you recommend a heavy/light/or none at all fertilizing and is there any other element I should add to the soil to promote new root growth? At nearly twenty years old is this Malus considered old, how long do they typically live? kt