The Arbor Day Foundation is a wonderful organization, helping to plant trees all over the world and bringing all of the many benefits of trees along with them. As their way of saying thank you for donating to their organization they will ship you about a dozen trees to plant in your yard. The shipping is timed so that the trees arrive to you just in time for planting.
The trees are shipped bare root, you can see them in the white bucket in the above picture. Bare root trees are an extremely cost effective way of shipping trees, but their survival rate isn't as high as those shipped in containers. We had a dozen or so shipped to us last Spring and planted them in the ground the very next day. None of them ever leafed out.
We weren't expecting a whole lot from free bare root trees, but anything above 0% survival would have been preferred. This past fall we had another dozen shipped to us and on the recommendation of Meredithe's uncle Tim we started them in containers. One of the dozen was a Blue Spruce which, being an evergreen, was easy to see that it had arrived alive. The rest we could have scratched the bark and monitored closely to see if they were still alive, but we just stuck them in these containers and protected them from too much light and wind by placing them along the Southern wall of our shed, back in the woods and hoped for the best.
To our pleasant surprise, they have begun leafing out this Spring. So far I think we have a Dogwood and a Washington Hawthorn. Hopefully more of them will leaf out as the weather continues to warm up this Spring. But even if the others don't make it, at least a 25% survival rate is better than 0%!
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| Washington Hawthorne |
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| Dogwood |
