Protection from wind - planting in holes!

Live in Wyoming. Wind is atrocious. Something has to be done to protect plants or wind burn kills them. So I'm toying with the idea of planting in holes. I figure when the plant is strong and starts growing out of the hole it'll be strong enough to survive the wind. I also think the hole would collect water and with enough mulch could be a great thing in general. Anyone see any downsides?

Sounds good to me. My location is extremely arid and at certain seasons has atrocious winds every afternoon. Dust storms obscuring everything for a few minutes, sand in your eyes, the whole thing. I often see that if there are hollows out in the desert, the plants congregate in them. They collect mulch on their own initiative too.

It is bad if you have poor draining soils (water pools and drowns the roots) but in a dry area it should work.

You may want to plant it level with the ground and build up a mound around it, so the soil line doesn't change and rot the bark--depending on the species.

I have clay soil so it's very poor draining. We don't get a heck of a lot of rain though so maybe it'd be ok? I have tons of starts off my bushes so perhaps I'll just do a few tests.

So I went as far from the house as I could and planted some bush starts about 1' deep in holes. pics to follow as it's giving me issues. The first is with no mulch in it, second shows mulch, third shows how I've decided to water them, wine bottles.

Without mulch

with mulch

wine bottle watering

So it seems planting bushes about 1ft down in a hole has been pretty successful. I planted around 15 and I'd say over 1/2 did very well. The problem is I didn't really think much about the experiment and haven't gone to look at them in months. While I see that many of them have survived and thrived I also see that without fencing they've been eaten pretty well by rabbits. I'm still very happy. As far as a total neglect planting method goes, this one has been really great for me. I think it protected them nicely from the wind, captured what little water they got and all in all was good. I have no pics of the plantings now. I didn't even think about it. But here is what I'm talking about as a took a few pics when I did the plantings.

Basically I took offshoots of my bushes and planted them in the bottom of small holes, then mulched them with moldy straw.

Sounds interesting, any chance you have a few control plants to judge against? Also you said half did well, what about the other half?

Wyatt Barnes wrote:Sounds interesting, any chance you have a few control plants to judge against? Also you said half did well, what about the other half?

Well I have an entire row of Caragana Arborescens in my tree line. It has been spreading and I've simply been digging up the off shoots. So I suppose you could say the line of parent plants is an adequate control. They are thriving.

But yes, half did well. Probably a bit more than that but I could only see 1/2 when I went out. Again, the rabbits ate them. So I did this way back in June. I thought maybe I should water them at planting so I put some wine bottles of water in with them (see pic). And that is the only attention I gave them the whole year. I finally remembered them and went to look last weekend. Many looked like they would have thrived, if they hadn't been eaten. I could probably still fence them and a few would live. I'm just not that invested. I'm going to do far more all over the property this year and I'd say the hole method worked well enough I'll continue with it. I think I will fence at the time of planting this next time though.

I'm mostly interested in using these bushes in my animal specific area as weather shields and silvapasture type helpers. Since I have an abundant supply of offshoots it just makes sense to me.