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Hello gardening friends, welcome to Backyard Basics. So it's this time of the year, December,
January, February, when you're going to find bare root plants in you gardening center.
And a lot of folks are kind of concerned about dealing with bare root plants. But, you can
go down to the garden center, there's fruit trees, sometimes they're in a sleeve, sometimes
they're bare root buried out there, and something really important your success. They're easy
to do, a lot of folks have never done it and they're kind of concerned about bare root,
might find something like this and a grape or a berry, or fruit trees too. So you'll
pull them out of the ground and they'll bring them to you, you know when you're looking
around, you might find that there's damaged roots, and we might want to remove those,
here's one right here that's just dangling, so I'm going to go in there and make a nice
clean cut on it. Any other damaged ones? No, it's looking good right now. So let's say
if it's a peach tree, you might when you get home, soak the roots so they rehydrate, for
two to four hours, not that long, they need air too, but it really helps, and I add a
little seaweed to the water, it seems to have that hormone in there that stimulates roots,
so that's the way I get them going. All of them, any of the bare roots. Another one of
the things is to bury the hole, make the hole one step wide, two steps out, so it's one
to two, and you make an ugly hole too, you kind of have rough edges on it. So dig it
twice as wide as it is deep. You put that crown on there, so let's say that this is
a little pile of soil. And so what you're going to do is you're going to put the plant
right on top of the little pile and we do it on purpose so the roots spread out, if
you put it in there without that, you might find that they grow down and begin to girdle
themselves, so any of the bare root you'll put up on a little piece of soil like this
and then they're going to spread and go in all directions. When you fill the hole, kind
of halfway fill it, use the soil that came out of there, if it's really poor maybe you
want to mix something special to go in there, and then you'll kind of put half of it in
there, and then you add a little water to it, and then tap it down a bit, we're just
trying to get the air out of there, and then you fill up the rest of if and you're on your
way. Some folks will build a dam around it in order to keep the water focused in that
area. The first two weeks are the more crucial weeks of them all. This is the difference
between the survival of your plant and the success of it. You know one of the things
that can happen is that the roots will dry out, you don't give it enough water and yet
you have to be careful not to overwater, there are many benefits to products that you'll
find in the nursery trade, this is one of them right here. This is a little tree guard.
It keeps critters from eating on the bark, squirrels for example, and killing the plant
right off the bat. The other thing it does is it keeps those weed-eaters off of there,
a lot of folks are careless with their weed-eaters, so when you take it home, make sure that it's
wrapped very well, keep it moist, put it in a dark place, and ideally you would be planting
it in the 24 to 48 hour period, that's also crucial at keeping these things going. So
there's a few hints for you on getting those fruit trees off to an excellent start, whether
it's grapes, peaches, apples, or blackberries like this, they all benefit from the same
thing. For Backyard Basics, I'm John Grongul.
Whether it's a berry or a grape or a fruit tree, you never want to plant above the original
soil line, or it can damage the plant.