Best way to store bare root trees

Store them? Just plant them - now is the ideal time. If your ground is clay you may need to open it up to allow drainage (add organic matter)




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If your ground is totally water logged then you would be better to delay, likewise if you feel it's too wet for you to get out . Try to minimise storage time but you can do so long as the roots don't dry out. Slightly moist compost (not wet!) is good but don't feed at this time of year, the whole point of bare root is that they are dormant.


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Bare root trees should be planted as soon as possible.

If the ground conditions aren't right (such as frozen or waterlogged) wait until the soil is ready and "heel-in" the trees which can be as simple as laying them on the ground and mounding soil over the roots to keep out the light and prevent the roots from drying out.
The trees also need to be kept outdoors in the cold or they will leaf-out far too early and be at risk of frost damage or even dehydration due to not having had the proper time to grow roots in spring with which to power the growth of the new leaves.

If you use chicken pellets or other "raw" manures in direct contact with their roots the trees will suffer severe "fertiliser scorch" if/when they start to grow again - and it might even kill them!
Manures and fertilisers tend to be so rich that they suck water out of the plant, causing dehydration, wilting and dieback.

Make sure the rootstock the trees are grafted to is suitable for your conditions (and also how disease-prone the variety might be; common varieties tend to be very prone to diseases), and that the rootstock is suitable for the amount of feeding/watering/spraying you plan to do and that it is suitable to grow into the size of tree you want.
The most common rootstocks on unlabelled trees tend to be MM106 (apple), Quince A (pear), St.Julien A (plum) and Colt (cherry) and they tend to reach about 3m in average soils.
However, in good soils and climates those rootstocks might reach 5m and in poor soils they may only reach 1.5m. When determining "poor" or "good" soil, the single most important factor is the availability of water - rainfall - and therefore trees in the West of the UK will tend to grow larger than trees in the East.
Next most important is warmth and sunshine, with trees in the South of the UK tending to benefit more than trees in the North.
Not all scion varieties grow at the same rate either; some varieties grow so large that they can partially override dwarfing rootstocks, while others grow so slowly that they tend to struggle to grow at all when grafted onto dwarf roots and will only behave normally when grafted onto very vigorous rootstocks.

Sorry for hi-jacking the thread, but I just HAVE to take advantage of FB's vast knowledge.

In late November I planted 4 fruit trees (part of a GYO offer) These are Apple Golden Delicious, Pear Conference, Plum Victoria and Cherry Morello.

As far as I can find there are no nearby pollinators for the Apple, so, do I need to plant a pollinator, and if so, which would be best for a garden in County Durham?

Thanks again.

Conference, Victoria and Morello are sufficiently self-fertile to crop without a pollinator.
Apple trees are more common than other fruit trees so there are probably enough apple trees (including crab apples or wild seedlings growing in hedgerows or alongside motorways) nearby to pollinate your Golden Delicious.

So I don't think you'll have a major problem.

If, in a few years time, the trees blossom well but don't seem to produce fruit, it could be lack of bees - they are in decline and they don't fly as much in cold, wet or windy weather. Bees are also far more interested in "bulk harvesting" from a large tree with thousands of blossoms than harvesting from a small tree with only a few flowers. So small, young trees often don't get many bee visits and therefore don't fruit well for the first few years.

If the trees don't blossom then they are either being over-fed, have slipped into biennial cropping or (in the case of the warm-climate-variety Golden Delicious) may not be getting enough sun and warmth to encourage flowering and fruiting.

Thanks for the info, FB.

I will wait a couple of years to decide whether to find a pollinator for the GD, based on your reply.

Thanks again

George

You could graft one branch of the GD with a suitable pollinator variety. A variety such as Discovery would be a good pollinator for GD (and vice-versa) and Discovery would ripen its fruit several weeks before GD, giving a longer season. Varieties from the Cox family should also pollinate well with GD, although Cox itself can be a sickly tree.

Great advice, FB. You should write an article to be made into a sticky, charting the planting and care/grafting of fruit trees, if you have the time. I have looked through a lot of your posts and I think you have done most of the work already, it just needs collating into one place.

George

Golden Delicious is partially self-fertile, which I assume is why is it was chosen for the GYO offer. I doubt you will need a pollinator although of course it helps if you have.

Going back to the original question, there is no problem keeping bare-root trees heeled in (as described by FB) for several months if necessary - as long as you get them planted before spring starts. Given a choice between planting immediately in flooded ground or heeling them in elsewhere and waiting, I would wait a bit.

Hi, thanks for all the advice. My ground at the moment is totally waterlogged. It does have some drainage in as I've found some of it. So it looks as if I'm going to have to wait a bit to plant them.