hey there welcome to this week's video blog today we're going to show you how to transplant shrub so the first thing you want to consider when you're transplanting a shrub is how you're going to move around the plant so that you can get in with your shovel or your nursery spade and we like to tie up the plants so that we have room to walk around and get around the plant easily so we're not bumping up against other shrubs or trees so we tie a knot like this with a loop in it and you can either tie it to a branch first or you can just lasso the whole thing if it's smaller just bring it right in around feed the rope through the sizal you can use whatever rope you have laying around and just cinch it together and just tie it off you'll be ready to start with the shovel so we have our plant tied up uh the next step is to take this shovel this is a nursery spade it's meant specifically for this you can see it's all metal so it won't bend if you use a wooden shovel could snap on you so we like to use these but what you want to do is take the shovel and you want to go straight down and not cry yet because you don't want to break the plant quite yet and then take it out and just go all the way around the plant doing this one thing to consider is you always want a pretty large root ball when transplanting a plant you got to remember you're cutting the roots and so the plants going to go into shock so you want to get as much roots as possible when doing this so here we are we have it popped uh as you can see the uh the new root ball uh it got a little bit closer it was out here before uh you sometimes with plants you can't avoid it depending on which plant you get some root better than others so you can get a better root ball out of them the japanese holly tends to be kind of tough on that aspect it is hard to get a good root ball on it but this root ball is still large enough and so what we're going to do is we're going to take it out i'm going to put it on some burlap and we'll show you that next so we have our japanese holly uh on our burlap and this is pretty simple you're just gonna grab opposite corners of the burlap bring them together and tie them into a simple knot and i'm just putting the other side there you go now you've got the root ball nice and tight and if you need to move it you can grab them by the handlebars now that you've created with the knots so before we plant our japanese holly we want to show you this we have a rhododendron here that we've already cut out we've already taken the steps to pop it it's just sitting in the hole but the problem here is that we can't do it by hand this is very clay filled soil so uh this this root ball although not too large it's probably somewhere around 500 pounds something like that so what we have is the john deere and we're going to show you how we take out the shrubs that are too large for us to do by hand we have our burlapped japanese holly where we want it to be next step is we're going to dig the hole you want to dig it twice as wide as where the plant is that'll give you room to move it around if needed uh so we'll catch up to you and we have to pull doug we want to make sure that we have the correct depth so you want to check the depth of the root ball you wouldn't want to bury it too high or too low so we can go ahead we're going to take the burlap off get it in the hole get it positioned this would be a good time if you wanted to add some type of fertilizer some plantain or roots you can mix it in with the backfill check the bags for the suggested amount uh this particular soil we had this amended previously so we don't have to add any fertilizer but if you wish to do so now would be the time so we'll go ahead and get this in the hole and get it back so we have our plant in the ground thing to keep in mind is plants will go into shock after they're transplanted so you want to water it as quick as possible put a well around the base of the plant to hold some water in that way it can get firmly rooted if you have any questions or comments you can feel free to post them on the blog we'll try to get back to you as soon as possible from all of us here the garden continuum thanks for watching