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Water Bags and Why We Don’t Use Them

Our Urban Forestry team often gets asked if they will be providing water bags to residents with newly planted trees. Although they have been included with your new tree in the past, the team has found that tree watering bags cause more trouble than they are worth.

In Salt Lake City’s desert climate, watering your park strip trees is essential to their health and survival. In the past, to aid watering, the Urban Forestry team provided two styles of watering bags (upright and donut) to act as supplemental watering sources throughout the week. However, over time, the team has noticed several issues with them.

Upright bags wrap around the tree trunk and are meant to be filled twice a week during the warmer months. These bags create a dark, humid environment around the trunk which can produce the perfect conditions for pests and diseases to thrive. In addition to this, the water inside the bags can get extremely hot in the summer months and ultimately ends up damaging the trunk.

Donut bags mitigated a few of these issues by lying flat on the ground as opposed to touching the trunk directly. However, the team noticed that their positioning on the ground prevented water from soaking into the soil around the tree, which is essential to root establishment and health.

After a few seasons of using water bags, the Urban Forestry team also noticed that they were often being used as the sole source of water for newly planted trees, despite their intended purpose. This confusion has unfortunately led to many of the city trees being underwatered.

What Should You Use Instead?

               Urban Forestry recommends directly watering the ground at a slow rate so the water can soak deep into the soil. In practice, it usually takes around the same amount of time to water the ground directly as it would to fill the bags. To find out more information, please check out Urban Forestry’s watering guide, which goes into depth on how often and how much to water trees.

               If you still have a watering bag on your tree, Urban Forestry recommends getting rid of it as soon as possible. Water bags can’t be recycled, so you may dispose of them however you choose. Thank you for helping the Urban Forestry team take care of our city’s trees — and remember to Keep Your Cool!