herbicide until we could get around to removing the soil, the contaminated soil. in terms of removing the soil, i know you built a little bit of a barrier around the tree. you have gone to great lengths to get the contaminated soil from around the trees. they re old trees i, imagine you can t just uproots them. what was the process by which you took the soil away from the trees as best you could, while still trying to keep them standing and safe? it was really a two-step process. we built these plastic greenhouses to enclose the area around the two beds the trees are growing in. the purpose of this was to retain any dust that was blown up during the loosening of the soil around the roots. our first attempt at removing soil involved coming in with an
we poured it into the root scene and watered it in, the intention with this was to bind the herbicide until we could get around to removing the soil, the contaminated soil. in terms of removing the soil, i know you built a little bit of a barrier around the tree. you have gone to great lengths to get the contaminated soil from around the trees. they re old trees i, imagine you can t just uproots them. what was the process by which you took the soil away from the trees as best you could, while still trying to keep them standing and safe? it was really a two-step process. we built these plastic greenhouses to enclose the area around the two beds the trees are growing in. the purpose of this was to retain any dust that was blown up during the loosening of the soil around the roots.
ross perot responded by handing over a blank check to pay for the cost of nursing the tree back to health. the costs ran into six figures. that tree these days i have to say is not in great shape, but it is still alive and produced its first acorns eight years after it almost got tree murdered and survived thanks in part of ross perot and his act of generosity. now america is dealing with another sentimental case ofr f murder. it happened earlier this year at auburn university in alabama where somebody poisoned two oak trees in auburn. there was not a blank check figure to come to the rescue. this time there s a tire community of people who have joined facebook groups and donated money to pay for an effort to try and save these trees, even entering a lottery to buy seedlings to keep their genetics alive somehow. in january, a man called into a alabama radio station to claim
trees alive. they have removed and replaced contaminated soil, trying to neutralize the affects of the poison, they coated the leaves with an anti-transperence to slow down the water the trees send to the leaves because doing that it could make them take up less new water contaminated by the poison. joining us now, gary keever, professor of horticulture at auburn. professor keever, thank you so much for your time. glad to be here. going to ask you to explain the point of the anti-transperence on the leaves better than i just did. sure. the leaves have the backside that serve for gas
process. we built these plastic greenhouses to enclose the area around the two beds the trees are growing in. the purpose of this was to retain any dust that was blown up during the loosening of the soil around the roots. our first attempt at removing soil involved coming in with an air spade and is basically the instruments that are attached to an air compressor. and it s used to blast soil off of the roots, and it does minimal damage to the roots. and the enclosure kept us from contaminating other areas. we used this in combination with what i call a super vacuum. this large truck with a hose on it that would suck the loosened soil out and we would carry that to a disposal site. we came back in later, when we realized we didn t get all the contaminated soil out, and we used high pressure water to break up more of the soil and go deeper into the beds and we also