Q: How do you plant a bare-root fruit tree? A: In late winter or very early spring bare-root fruit trees show up in your nurseries. You can follow this low-work method and plant a bunch of trees without a lot of hassle.
- First, prune back any broken or very long roots. This will stimulate the root hormones to put out little feeder roots, and that will be beneficial to the tree.
- Locate a place where the soil has been turned up. Just set the tree right on top of the soil. Put a little soil over the roots with your hand so that the tree stays up straight. You don't have to dig a hole.
- Take a shovel, and about a foot or two out from the tree, dig a shovel full of soil and mound it up over the roots. Go all the around the tree.
- Notice the depth to which the tree was planted before, and don't put soil above that line or you can actually kill the tree.
- As we mound the soil up around the roots, we are also digging a trench around the tree; when we water and when the rains come, the trench around the tree will help hold water and keep the tree well-watered.
- Step on the soil all the way around so that the soil is in good contact with the roots.
- The trimmed roots will not support all of the leaves that are going to come out of the buds, so we do something drastic: take this little tree back to one bud. Find the first bud, cut about a half inch above it, and the whole top comes off. We have one bud now, and when this tree wakes up in a few weeks that little bud is going to push. It's going to have lots of roots to support it so it's going to be nice and healthy. It will grow the next year to a nice tall trunk again, maybe three or four feet high. It will be healthier than it would have been if we had left the whole top on.
- When it grows up, tie it to a stake that is already in the ground so that you don't hurt the roots.
Jeff Cox, Host
