Anybody purchase trees from Sophia 2007 this year?

General Fruit Growing
#1

I am posting this because in private communication, there have been a handful of people who have had similar experiences to mine.

Sophia2007 has been a member of this forum for a while now and she was offering several varieties of rare plants this year. She also sells trees/plants on etsy. Her name is Yujuan Wang.

I ordered a Taishu persimmon and a Baiyu loquat. She did warn me that the Baiyu loquat leaves were unhealthy but they would recover fine.

The trees were sent by UPS ground bareroot and it took over 14 days to arrive here. The top growth on the trees was large and very good. However I was very disappointed to see that there was hardly any root mass on the trees. It looked like she had ripped the trees off the ground instead of digging them out. Further, they didn’t have sawdust, paper cuttings or anything to keep what remained of the root mass moist.
Since it was still late winter here, I heeled in the trees for a couple of weeks in moist sawdust in the hope that they would recover. Unfortunately they both simply dried out and died.

I reached out to Yujuan/Sophia and asked if she could send me replacement trees. She did not respond for over a week. After repeated messages, she grew belligerent and told me that I was the only one with a problem and didn’t know how to grow trees. Heeling in a tree in sawdust according to her was a bad idea and that is what killed the trees.

My post on this topic is to see if my experience was isolated. If so, I will chalk it up to bad karma. If not, it should be a warning to others who wish to purchase from her in the future.

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Zhanhua Dongzao set so many fruits naturally first time
#2

Photos

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#3

That looks like an air layer that was cut straight from the tree with too little root mass. The top should have been cut back and then grown out for a season to stabilize the root mass before selling.

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#4

Actually it is a grafted tree that she decided to cut the roots all the way back. Never understood why.

#5

If that is the case then that one must have had an amazing tap root. It was probably growing great so in her mind its later demise was unexpected and therefore she thought it was your fault. I’ll never understand how some people are able to so severely underestimate the importance of preserving enough root mass to support the amount of top growth when transplanting.

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#6

I got private mails that there have been many complaints about her in other social media. She sells unhealthy trees and then when they die she blames the buyer.
I’ll ask that people post here in public if they would like to.

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#7

With so little root on trees that size, it is more like selling cuttings than actual trees.

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