Kavell,

Cancel!!!!!! your top soil shipment!!!!!!!!!!!! I once planted a big tree like yours into exactly what you describe. I had help fortunately as the soil was actually dried to the consistency of concrete.

What you truly need to do is take your pitchfork after you measure the diameter of both lengthwise and vertical of your rootball and dig to a depth of almost as deep of the vertical dimension but dig very wide.

'Today' it is common growing practice to, "dig three times the diameter of the rootball." In your case, I'd dig 6 times the diameter of the rootball.

And that's exactly what I elected to do with this other large tree.

You can certainly toss in some organic matter but not very much. For that entire area you'll be digging, you might use 2 bags of compost. Skip the peat. I also methodically stood by all the backfill soil and chipped at it with a shovel and broke it up as finely as possible. It must of took us a minimum of an hour for 4-5 of us to plant this tree I made mention about earlier.

The compost certainly won't over do the amending practices of today but only as long as you don't do anything like 50/50, try to stay about 80-90% at the level of consistency with native soil.

This to me for everyone to comment on is a perfect example despite what any "book" would say or even what any college university might too say regarding ammending soil about the use of soil ammendments.

I can't comment if that tree we planted made it, but that's what I did because I thought to myself at the time that this tree will never make it otherwise.

Nice purchase by the way.

Dax