I will be doing the same thing this year. It will be my third mini orchard. It takes about 3 years to get fruit, so start as soon as you can. The trees are gorgeous in bloom. Home grown fruit is so much better than anything you get from stores. My dad had red and gold delicious apples that were crispy and juicy from the tree - not like those insipid things from the store. I had Gala apples that were aromatic - loved them - this one fell over on the side and we called her Bonzai Gala. My favorite peach was White Champion from Miller Bros; had most of the well known ones from Stark Bros but I liked this one best. This time I am getting fancy 4-in-1 trees from Raintree. Not the best idea - hard to keep some grafts alive - but I am getting too old to have many trees with their huge bounty and just want variety to try. I will get 2 4-in-1 apples, 1 4-in-1 pear, 1 4-1 peach/nectarine, and 1 self pollinating apricot and 2-3 peaches from this or another company - maybe USASeed. 1. Make sure the soil is OK - I had to cope with heavy clay twice; last time I planted in raised beds and on hills. 2. Make sure the trees are self pollinating or are compatible for pollination. 3. Make sure they are in the right zone. I wanted pluots this time but they are not hardy here. 4. Make sure you stake them properly. Last time I did not stake dwarfs and the apples fell over when in fruit. 5. Be prepared for whatever spraying program you need. If you skip some, bugs get them. Spraying is a pain but is required for most fruit. I always wondered if chickens would really take care of the codling moth. The dormant spray seems to be the most important. This time I will be planting semi dwarfs and will stake them for the first 5 yrs with metal stakes. I am skipping small stone fruits because they got too buggy for me. I had to spray apples a lot, had no problems with pears, peaches, or apricots. Could not get decent fruit from plums or cherries. One year I even had bugs on grapes. Different results from different locations and years.

The idea is to plant them so they can begin to grow when other trees already establish nearby do so. That is when you should arrange shipping because it's difficult to store them without a huge refrigerator. Usually when the ground is thawed, extreme cold that might damage a bare root transplant has passed. I started planting here in southeastern NY last week. The snow kept the ground from freezing this year. I also always do some bare root transplanting as late as mid Dec and well mulched trees don't seem to suffer from this. Bare root fall transplanting is often advised against in the northeast but I've never seen any research on the subject and I haven't found any problems with it. It certainly works better than waiting until mid-spring.

Shrubs will establish best in the cool, wet weather of spring. Frost has no meaning for them unless, as the previous poster mentioned, they have not been hardened off or have been shipped from a more southern zone and the leaves are way ahead of where they would be if they had been growing in your zone. I still would put them out and protect them if you have frost. As for perennials, I (zone 5b) start dividing them in late April and through March as soon as I can see them. If they're up, they're ready for it.

Every water lily I've ordered has come with large leaves and sometimes with flower pods. My pond is about 2-1/2 deep in the spot where I wanted the lilies, so I just went ahead and lowered them to the bottom. They were at the surface by the next evening. For all the others, some people have good luck planting bareroot, but I never have. I do think everything looks m ore natural barerooted with space to grow and spread, but you do have to be careful to keep them in check, or they'll take over. I have a zebra rush barerooted in my stream gravel, and it hasn't grown an inch since I planted it last spring. I also tried pickerel in gravel, and it went yellow from lack of nutrients. When I planted them in a pot of soil, they greened up. As a result, I plant all my aquatics except pennywort in clay soil. I then put some sand on top of that, followed by pea gravel to hold everything down. Then, when you lower it into the pond, be careful to let a little water in at a time so that it doesn't disturb the gravel.