Take a razor and make slices around the root ball. Roots always try to go to water. So the dry medium forces them into the moister native soil. I agree with blueberry I would never touch the roots when they have leaves. I have seen others use your idea while dormant with good success. In fact I have on accident done it a few times. There wasn’t enough root to pull the dirt out.
One other thing that can go wrong besides root girdling with large potted trees …. is that a potting soil heavy on bark and peat or pine fines and peat will decay in time, and in a windy location that lack of dirt (a cavity) around the trunk area can cause the tree to become loose in the ground and blow over…unless the roots have really spread out into heavy clay or dense soil and hold the tree in place well.
It hasn’t kept me from buying trees in nursery pots, but it can and does happen from time to time.
2 Likes
Alan, informative write-up, thank you. I planted a multi-graft asian pear bareroot (on quince root stock), that has been really slow to establish. The tree I received was healthy with close to an inch caliper, is there anything that can be done for these type of trees that have no fibrous root system.
I am kicking myself getting a bunch of pluots from Groworganic, and peach/nectarine from OGW, the quality of trees are so piss poor thin whips they are taking forever to leafout and grow. Meanwhile trees from raintree, four winds have 3" shoots. From my observations the thickness of the caliper both trunk, feathers in any and fiborus roots left on the specimen. But in general, potted trees have done well for me. I am tempted to remove some of these wimp trees and replace them with potted ones.
I have a lifetime of experience with BR plants, starting in the 1960’s when Tree World, I think it was, always sold BR fruit trees in the spring near the S. CA home of my youth. You’d pull them out of sawdust.
Every spring I plant between one and two hundred bare root trees from other nurseries into my own and grow them into bearing age trees for sale, selling most every tree I grow and planting them- 70% of them bare root.
Your experience is a mystery to me and I wouldn’t want other members to believe that potted plants are necessarily a better option for them if they follow procedures that give bare roots there best chances. As far as I’m concerned, the only real advantage of buying potted trees is that you don’t have to plant them when they are dormant- in warm climates you can plant them any time during the year.
I have built the reputation of my business on the quick establishment of my bare root trees. Right now I owe one customer a replacement tree- I guarantee all the trees I plant. It was a container pear tree which was very much alive when I planted it. I assume he failed to water it during a stretch of drought because potting soil tends to dry out quickly. That is a key liability of potted trees- that and their usual limited root system.
However, my potted bearing age trees do have the advantage of not staggering the first year you transplant them, but by the third year that advantage is lost. Large stone fruit trees tend to do poorly in pots and I only keep them in 25 gallon pots for a short time- by poorly, I mean they lose their vigor, not that they couldn’t be maintained as small fruiting trees.
Pears are the other side of the coin and I never sell them as bare root trees. They often do OK as small whips transplanted BR, but larger bearing age trees are another story.
I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but where I live in Canada since Covid hit bare root and potted are virtually the same if buying in the early spring. Basically they are identical at that time, because at both of my local nurseries they get bare root trees in March or April and then pot them up for sale.
One of the nurseries heels in the bare root trees and sells them as bare root trees for a week or two until they get them all potted up. The other nursery simply receives the bare root trees and pots them immediately for sale.
The root systems are usually badly hacked and after they pot them up they often blow over in the pot at the nursery that doesn’t sell them bare root as they’re in a windy location.
The bare root option is better where I live if buying locally, because they sell them $15 cheaper than their potted version of the same tree. Might as well buy the bare root for cheaper, and avoid the shock of having to be transplanted twice during the same year.
Buying bare root mail order fruit trees in Canada is totally dependent on the nursery you buy from. In my experience you’re better off buying from a nursery that sells larger trees at a higher cost that buying from a nursery that sells small trees at a discount. My experience with the small bare root trees is I’ve had a higher mortality rate the smaller the trees are. I’ve also found that these small trees languish and take years to size up. The smaller ones on average take 3 years extra to fruit compared to the larger ones I’ve purchased. The cost savings isn’t worth all the extra time it takes for them to size up IMO.
My opinion is the quality of bare root trees has gone way down over the years. I have bought so many bare root trees severely lacking roots or none at all. There was a time when most companies sent quality products every order, but those days are slipping away and that is why there are so many people on here complaining. I’m not against bare root, just the quality of what is being sold now. I favor the potted trees because most of the time they have more root mass.
Personally I want to inspect the roots and flare them out in the planting hole the way I want. That’s pretty hard with a potted plant. You can rinse off the potting soil with a hose or blow some of it off with an air compressor but it’s a pain. Plus extra soil can harbor disease. Kinda like the way a lot of commercial sweet potato growers prefer slips with no roots or soil attached. The less “foreign” soil you bring onto your farm the better. But I agree the quality of trees is really variable right now. You have to choose your nursery carefully.
My primary source is Adams County Nursery and the product hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years, although this year they sent me some trees with obvious crown gall for the first time.
Actually, some varieties, some years are silly small, while the next year they may be 1" caliber- they used to almost never send me any bundles of tiny trees. However the roots haven’t changed at all. They’ve always torn up peach and pear roots pretty bad but they ship me more attached root than some west coast nurseries…
I would think your problem is probably due to how the trees you’ve been getting have been handled after digging. I ordered a single Crunch-a-Bunch tree from Guerneys a few years back in, like, July, thinking they’d ship it the following spring. They sent me a tiny tree out of cold storage right away. Of course, that tree has taken a lot of time to size up.
1 Like
If you want cold hardy walnuts try grimo in canada