Bare Root Fruit Trees
Bare root is a great way to go on fruit trees. While the trees are dormant during the winter they are removed from the ground. Bare root trees acclimate more quickly to new soil conditions and they are also more economical.
When choosing where you’ll purchase fruit trees, keep a few things to keep in mind:
Grading
Tree growers grade their plants. The tree grade tells the size and quality of the tree. Trees with a higher grade are the cream of the crop. They have grown large and healthy during the growing season. High grade trees are generally sent to orchards and nurseries like Youngs Garden. Youngs will generally carry 3/4″ caliper or larger fruit trees.
The smaller and lower quality trees are typically sent to big chain stores. Sometimes these are 1-yr trees or those with a smaller caliper that didn’t grow as much in a given season. These aren’t necessarily bad trees, they just aren’t going to be as vigorous or bear fruit as quickly.
Roots Before Fruits
Fruit trees are bagged for the convenience of stores, not for the benefit of the gardener. The bags give the trees a longer shelf life, but the roots are severely pruned to fit. This makes for a weaker tree and delayed fruit production.
At Youngs, rows of bare root trees are healed into bark mulch bins. This provides gardeners with easy selection of trees with full root systems and also extend the time that our bare root trees can be purchased.
Rootstock
Almost all fruit trees are grafted onto a root stock. The root stock used is instrumental in determining the size of the tree, but even more importantly it dictates how well a tree will do in different types of soil. Not all root stocks or fruit tree varieties are suitable for all areas.
Our tree varieties and their accompanying root stocks are selected to thrive in Douglas County. Most of what we offer will be on a semi-dwarf root stock for more manageable trees and be able to handle heavy soils. Some of our varieties will also come as dwarf and standard sized trees.
Read more about rootstock on our fruit trees.
Young's Bare Root
Our bare root trees are large, properly cared for, and the varieties that do best in our area.
With fruit trees you want fruit. To produce fruit it takes an older, healthy tree. Our bare root trees generally begin to yield the next year and many of our potted trees produce fruit the same year.
Other's Bagged Trees
To fit into these bags the roots are severely pruned. These trees may be cheap, but you defiantly get what you pay for. A weak root system can’t support the top of the tree. This not only delays fruit production, but may also lead to other problems with the tree as well.