3 Tips For Storing Your Bare-Root Fruit Trees

3 Tips to Storing Your Bare-Root Fruit Trees

Now is the time to start purchasing and preparing for Bare Root Fruit Trees. You might not be ready to plant these tree right now. The good news is, you don’t have to! When you receive your trees you can store them until you are ready to start planting. This week we will tell you the three most important tips about how to store those trees.

When purchasing your bare root fruit trees the roots are important to be aware of. There should be big structural roots and smaller feeder-type roots. They should be brown, not white. If they are white those are sugar roots, and with sugar roots you need to be very careful with because now the life of the tree is exposed in those white roots. In most cases bare root fruit trees don’t have those white roots showing yet. That is a sign that it’s getting too warm for the tree and it needs to get planted right away, but in a kind and tender way to assure it’s success in life. It’s a good indicator too that the core of the tree is alive, but it’s not something we typically like to see before we get the tree planted in the ground.

When your tree arrives there are three things that are important:

1. Keep them in the dark. When we say keep them in the dark, we mean you want to keep them completely in the shade so they don’t receive any sunlight. If you are familiar with our microclimates, you will want to keep them in microclimate F.

2. Keep them moist. You want to make sure the trees are moist, not soaked. A good way to do that is to place them in a non biomass type substrate, like a gravel. You can keep the gravel moist so the tree roots stay moist.

3. Keep them cool. Keeping them in cooler temperatures will help them survive longer outside of the ground. The warmer they get, the more damage they might endure.

Next week we are going to talk about heeling in the bare root fruit trees. To learn more about bare root fruit trees you can join our Mastery Program where you can ask questions, watch videos, get planting guides and more.