TreeVive™ - beyond fertilization
Help turn around stressed trees with our very own biostimulant fertilizer, custom-developed for the challenging soils and weather of Colorado. Biostimulants are products that can improve a plant's vitality - its ability to grow and thrive. Far beyond a traditional fertilizer, our solution gives ailing trees the boost they need to fight back against environmental stress.
Ask us if TreeVive™ can help your landscape.
Weather-related stress
Increasingly, the climate in Colorado is becoming less hospitable to trees. The trend has been hotter and drier, but also less stable. Even rapid temperature swings of 70, 80 degrees or more in 24 hours seem to have become semi-normal. Almost no tree is adapted to this kind of volatility, nor can they acclimate to it. We're seeing the effects of these difficult weather conditions show up in our landscape as well as our native trees as winter burn, freeze damage, sun scald and other conditions.
Soil and irrigation-related stress
In addition to the weather, Colorado Front Range soils tend to make things tough on plants by high alkalinity, poor drainage, low soil Oxygen and in new developments also suffer from compaction and low organic matter. Beneficial soil organisms like mycorrhizae may be absent in these soils. The low precipitation in Colorado also leads to salt build-up in the soil and can create a crust of bicarbonates on the soil surface that lock up minerals and reduce water infiltration. Irrigating with high pH city tap water exacerbates these problems.
It's with the above difficult conditions in mind that we created TreeVive™.
Despite the challenges above, trees that are given the best care (or are blessed to have excellent site conditions) can still thrive. Landscape trees growing in thick beds of mulch, which more closely mimics a forest floor, almost always seem to fair better than those growing in bare dirt or in rock beds. A healthy soil environment leads to a healthier tree. As mentioned above freeze damage from rapid temperature swings is one of our most serious issues trees face in our area, but a tree with a strong root system is much less likely to suffer freeze injury. This is because the hormone signal for a tree to go into winter dormancy is largely created in the root system. So a tree with an ailing or damaged root system will be highly susceptible to freeze injury, which perpetuates its downward-spiral. If we can intervene before its too late by helping build back up the root system, we may be able to preserve the tree.
We wanted something we could give trees to help them recover from and endure environmental stress, and knew that traditional fertilizer is not what we wanted.
Ingredients
At the center of TreeVive™ are two key ingredients: seaweed extract, and a mix of amino acids and peptides derived from hydrolyzed soy protein.
Seaweed extract
When it comes to seaweed extract's benefits to plant health, the verdict is in. Research and field trials unanimously support seaweed extract as being about the closest thing we may ever find to a miracle-elixir for plant health. Increased tolerance for drought conditions and soil salinity, increased heat stress tolerance as well as freezing tolerance, increased nutrient uptake and reduced oxidative stress are just some of the proven benefits of seaweed extract on plants. Research on tree crops such as fruit, nut and avocado trees tells us that seaweed is as useful on trees as it is smaller plants. Seaweed extract is also a good source of trace minerals and especially Potassium, a very important fertilizer mineral.
Hydrolyzed soy protein
Both a traditional fertilizer with its 14% Nitrogen content as well as a powerful biostimulant due to the plant-available amino acids and peptides, hydrolyzed soy protein or HSP is the other magic sauce to our formula. Stressed trees, even those in a downward spiral, can directly absorb and utilize the amino acids and peptides through the roots and immediately begin using these compounds for all sorts of functions that would otherwise be very biologically expensive for a plant depleted of energy reserves. This can give your trees a boost that nothing else can provide.
Other ingredients
Seaweed and HSP are the core of TreeVive™, but other products can be added depending on site-specific goals and circumstances.
We often will add molasses and/ or other carbohydrates as a source of sugars/ saccharides as well as carbon. The sugars in molasses give a boost to soil microbes which in turn help unlock nutrients bound in the soil for tree roots to access. Roots can also directly absorb these sugars to fuel their biological processes (as with peptides) at no cost to the plant. Trees in especially poor soils get a boost from a carbon source in which case we can add steamed coconut charcoal which has tremendous cation exchange capacity and neutralizes soil toxins as well as helps improve soil water retention. Another product that is high in polysaccharides is yuccah plant extract, an excellent soil wetting agent that helps with water infiltration and makes soil-bound minerals bio-available.
Newly-planted trees and trees grown in especially poor soil can really benefit from the addition of mycorrhizae, beneficial soil organisms that create symbiotic relationships with tree roots. These organisms (fungi and sometimes bacteria) increase the effective root mass and surface area of tree roots, allowing them to access more water and minerals. They also unlock minerals in the soil that otherwise would be tied up and inaccessible to tree roots. Lastly they help protect the root system from pathogens that could get in and kill roots and cause decay in the wood. Compost tea and earthworm casting leachate both provide an enormous amount of beneficial soil organisms and improve the soil quality and environment for these microbes. This can be especially useful for protecting trees that may be prone to soil-born pathogenic disease.
The ArboRx difference
As you may imagine, it takes a lot of the above to make a real and lasting difference for a tree's root ecosystem. A few ounces of product clearly isn't going to make an impact on a tree that weighs thousands of pounds. When trying to turn around stressed trees, we give it the best shot we can and use as much product as needed to help change the tree's situation. For a large tree in dire condition this can mean many pounds of each ingredient, delivered in 100+ gallons of water. We buy our products in bulk and as often as possible from local producers to get input costs as low as we realistically can so that we can give you the most for your money.
