John Kempf shows how to make a root dip for apple trees using one gallon of water, Rejuvenate, Sea Stim kelp extract, and BioCoat Gold to establish mycorrhizal fungi and beneficial microbes. Coat roots for 30 seconds to a minute. The mixture turns anaerobic within hours, so aerate it, dust dry BioCoat Gold after dipping, or work fast.
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I'm planting apple trees and I want to show you how to make a root dip. A root dip helps to colonize the roots of any perennial when you're planting it with the mycorrhizal fungi and other microbes that'll really help that root get established really well at the beginning. So here's what we're going to put into our root dip. I've got about a gallon of water here and the first thing is 2 ounces of Rejuvenate. Rejuvenate is the kind of microbial food and support package that's going to help those microbes I add get established really, really well. The next thing I'm going to put in is Sea Stim. This is a kelp extract. Um, it's mechanically processed, so it retains all the enzymes and good stuff. Seaweed has a ton of benefits. A couple reasons why I'm going to put it in my root dip are, um, it helps with root branching and higher root mass development. Um, it also, uh, what else does it do? 2 ounces of this as well. The final ingredient is BioCoat Gold. This is a microbial inoculant. We generally use it as a seed treatment, but it contains a number of strains of mycorrhizal fungi a bunch of bacteria and other good stuff too. So this is going to be the actual inoculant that coats the roots. I'm going to add an ounce of this per gallon of water. Then I have a pink children's shovel as a stirring tool. Stir it up really well. You can add any other goodies you want to this, but this is sort of a starting point. I've got the microbial inoculant, the actual microbes themselves. I've got the Rejuvenate which is the food and support to help those microbes get established really strongly. And then I've got the seaweed for all the benefits that it provides. Now, the— some of the ingredients in BioCoat Gold aren't actually water soluble, so I'll have a few chunkies and floaties in here. Um, if it's just sitting in a bucket, that's no big deal, but just use caution and don't pass it through a filter or anything that would clog if you're going to use BioCoat Gold and water. And then all I have to do is just dip the roots in there. A root dip is really just that, it's a dip. I don't actually need the plant to absorb any of this stuff, so it doesn't have to soak in here for a long time. I just really need to paint the surfaces of the root, if you will, with this, because that's where those mycorrhizae are going to get established. So just 30 seconds or a minute sitting in this dip is plenty. And the solution is quite thick, so you can see when I pull it out that these roots are totally coated with it, and they look really nice. Now I've just got microbes sitting in a bucket of water here, which is an anaerobic environment. Um, I've just got a couple of hours really before they start to die off and I lose their benefits. So I've got a few options here. One, I could aerate this mix. Two, I could leave out the dry BioCoat Gold and just dust it on after I've done the dip. Or tree, I can just work quickly and get the job done before it goes anaerobic. And that's what I'm going to do here. Now we've got an article up on our blog called Perennial Planting Principles that goes over this and a whole lot of other things too. I'd highly encourage you to check that out if you want to learn more. I'm going to get these trees planted, and then I'm going to give them a really good soak to water them in, and then I'm going to come back with another really important step, which is the post-planting drench, and I'll show you how to do that in the next video.
