GARDENER'S READING ROOM
The Art of Gardening

Bare Root to Beauty

It's still wet out, cold and sometimes even frozen, but Sky's employees are hard at work getting our stock ready for spring. We get many of our plants in winter as bare root stock. First to come in are the berries - yum! Next come fruit trees, roses, lilacs, and shade and flowering trees. Then come ball-and-burlap shrubs, conifers, and Japanese maples. Plant follows plant from mid January through March… then we get fresh container-grown stock spring to fall.

We've found that gardeners are most successful planting plants from containers, so we buy bare root dormant plants and pot them up ourselves.

Buying bare root plants gives us many advantages which we can pass on to you. We can get plants sooner, offer more varieties, and bring them in at better prices. Also, this gives Sky a chance to inspect the root system of each plant - sometimes, unfortunately, we have to reject stock.

Inspection is always the first step for every plant we bring in. Next, we bed them in damp sawdust to keep them from drying out while we prepare for the next steps. We soak each plant for 1-2 hours in a large tub with Superthrive plant activator. We prune the roots and branches as necessary, then plant each plant at its correct level in a pot containing a special planting medium (Sky's premium planting mix, mixed with pumice and extra compost to make it light enough for container use). We can tailor the mix for different plants, for example, by adding lime to counteract acidity. We add slow-release organic fertilizer with mycorrhizal inoculant to stimulate root growth in the container. Finally, we tag the plant and it's ready for you to purchase! Just prepare your bed, stick the plant in, and watch the miracle of nature unfold.

By Ken Plante
Skylights Spring 2005, Vol 19, No. 1

Other articles on the art of gardening