welcome to Hort tube my name is Jim Putnam and this is an October glory red maple this is the beautiful red fall foliage October glory red maple October glory is extremely cold hardy it can grow all the way up to zone three and then down to zone 8 October glory is listed almost websites forty to fifty feet tall and thirty feet and width it's almost certainly going to outgrow that in some length of time it's probably so far out in the distance it's just not something to worry about but it surprised me if this thing stopped at fifty feet or thirty feet in width red maples are pretty fast growing once established we may get as much as two to three feet of growth out of these in a single season in order to keep its best shape a red maple would definitely like to be in the full Sun they would take some light shade but they can end up stretching out and have a much thinner canopy in any deep shade because of the size and the rate of growth of October glory this is really going to be primarily used as a shade tree I don't think this is a great choice if you have a very small lot maples end up with surface roots which can be an issue and in a small light situation it's gonna have to be near your driveway near the road or near a sidewalk and a lot of times when the roots meet resistance on these red maples I've observed some decline in the top of the plant so they're kind of healthy and happy until that root system and the size of the plant kind of out grows a tiny little front yard space and so not a great choice in that situation I think you'd want to have some space for this plant and you also want to have this thing mulch in a multiplayer going right up to the base of it they don't play nice with one another at all so it needs to be like I say in a larger yard in a mulched space is ideal for these red maples I have four of these October glory red maples behind my garden center they've reached about thirty feet tall in about 15 years they're absolutely stunningly beautiful never really been pruned or anything like that this one's been under a little drought stress so it's showing a little bit of the fall color right here you can see where they're starting to turn red right here and all across the back of this place it's just bright bright red in the middle of October for me and it's really really quite stunningly beautiful I want to show you one other thing on these this is an asphalt Drive here but it's pretty far away from the trunk of this red maple this is gravel and riprap behind here for some erosion control this thing you know it's a gravel mulch is what it is but it's keeping the roots cool on this plant frequently you'll see these red maples planted in a front yard grass right up to the base of them or some kind of mulch column buried up on them and that those roots stay way too hot in that turf and every single time you mow the turf off you know which is once a week you allow the Sun to hit that soil again heat the soil up and it can actually cause damage to those roots so having a large mulch space like this and in this case it's just something as simple as gravel has really really helped this tree and then behind it it's got all the room in the world it can root out into a large field back here behind it I've included videos in the description of this video for planting woody trees and shrubs you're really not really any issues on these if you pull these out of a container though they're almost certainly going to be root bound so get after that pretty hard cut those roots on the edge pull it them make sure they're going to go outward you definitely don't want to circling in the future and definitely don't mulch up on the stem anything that you see entering that container you still want to see it after you've planted it after you've most it go back and pull that mulch away the first year your maples in the ground you definitely want to keep a close eye on watering it once it's rooted in if you're in an area to gets normal rainfall this tree is probably not gonna die from drought that's probably not something that's going to kill it but what happens is these things leaf out in the spring and they're absolutely beautiful all the new growth is beautiful on them the stems are kind of a reddish color really beautiful plant all through the spring when it gets dry in early June and gets really hot and it kind of meets some resistance with the water disappearing in the ground they can go through a big leaf drop you know mid mid to late June to avoid that you probably want to check on these in late May or June just be thinking about it this is a tree that looks its best when the soil moisture is regulated a little bit so I drag a water hose over to this just leave it on a trickle at the base and just kind of flood the area around it if you go through a prolonged dry period in the early summer the time to fertilize these red maples is in the late winter or early spring any slow release fertilizer for trees or shrubs for outdoor use would be fantastic just throw it right around the entire drip line of the tree and it needs to be something that will run out in three to four months we want to get these going through their cycle of leafing out in the spring and growing in the early summer and then kind of on the downswing into the fall to go dormant and get that beautiful fall color not a lot of pruning you can do on these red maples once they get very very large you will have to take some limbs off from the bottom and when I plant the tree if I already know that a limb has got to come off one day I typically will go ahead and take it off I don't see any reason and putting energy into growing this limb out when I know it's going to be in my face and it's definitely gonna come off I'd probably on this tree take off these bottom four so these two will eventually come off they don't need to today because they're going into up angle but these lower ones I definitely go ahead and take them off there's anything you need to take off the top you need to take it off sooner than later because once it's 30 feet tall it's very difficult to do that really not a lot of pests on these red maples I'll see some leaf spot issues on the foliage if the foliage stays too wet or if it's in too shady of a space this tree is pretty clean most of the insect related issues I've seen on these plants like mites Athens that kind of thing seemed to really show up on the most stressed plants so a plant that's growing vigorously just doesn't seem to have a lot of those issues so what are you waiting for even you can grow the beautiful red fall foliage October glory red maple thank you for watching my video and if it was helpful please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel for future videos also comment below with any questions you have about shade trees thanks again