The trees arrived sometime on Saturday afternoon. I found them Sunday morning. No time to even open the box on Sunday. Monday, today, is cold, blustery, with showers, so can’t plant today, argh.
I did open the box. All the trees look in excellent shape. We’re going to dedicate tomorrow to putting all ten of them in. If the winds don’t get too bad we’ll go out today and remark where they’re all supposed to be planted. However, the winds combined with the cold air make it a poor time to plant them. It could damage their roots.
I’ll take some photos while we plant and put together a short video. Look for it on the site later this week. I’ve found that trees are pretty forgiving. They really want to live. I think in all the trees we’ve planted (and that’s over 100) only one or two have died. One, when I bought it, was suspect, but I wanted a cherry tree so badly I was willing to give it a try. Luckily it came with a one-year guarantee, because it didn’t even leaf out. It makes me mad when I can tell that a company, that plants are their business, did a terrible potting job. The cherry tree had been grown in the ground. Then they dug it up and stuck it in a pot. However, since it was in the ground, it had put out major roots and it had hardly any roots on it when I put it in the ground. So few that all the dirt fell away from the root. That’s when I knew they had just yanked it out of the ground and stuffed it in a pot.
The trees I’ve received are bare root, so I need to get them in within the next 3-4 days or they’ll not make it. That’s why tomorrow is going to be dedicated to digging holes. We’ll try both a shovel and the rototiller. I used the rototiller to plant 60 trees in hard as rock clay when we lived in New Mexico and found it a breeze, but the soil here is softer, so we might not have to resort to the tiller.
Why do the trees always arrive when it is blustery?
