Yikes! didn't want to drown them, but they seemed dry to me... I did take them out of the water, shook off the excess and wrapped the roots up in plastic bags...it's supposed to stop snowing late tonight, hopefully the soil will dry out a bit so i can plant tomorrow. I thought about heeling them into my nursery bed, but they're calling for a low of 20 tonight, and they've all broken bud. THey're from Gurney's, and the trees look really nice. Don't want to plant them in their permanent spot because it's been snowing/raining for 5 days straight, and i just hate the idea of working such wet soil....they're going into one end of the garden i broke sod on last year, and i wanted to do a bit of ammending, too. I live on a glacial sand moraine, my next-door neighbor is a gravel pit, excessively well-drained is an understatement. MAN oh man am I glad I didn't order the other 10 trees yet!!! THanks!

Fast-forward 1.5 years from my last post. I've fertilized and kept the area weeded and mulched. Yet the tree has grown very little- two years after planting it is almost the same size. In comparison, the other Goldrush is over 10' tall (much better branched than the old pic) and produced ~10 apples last fall. So, I decided to make a change. I've dug it up (mostly) bare root and potted it in a 7 gal fabric container. Maybe it can make a comeback in a different environment. While digging it up, I tried to save as much roots as possible. But, I didn't find all that much in the way of roots. The tree I dug up is the bottom one in the below picture. The soil was very heavy. After I had the tree out, I dug down a few more inches and it was quite wet and a bit stinky. It seems that the roots were never able to establish. In its place, I'm planting an Izu persimmon from Burnt Ridge (the upper tree in the picture). Rather than risk the same fate with this tree, I took 8-10 shovels of dirt from the hole and mixed it with 3 cubic feet of pine bark and about 25-30 lbs of Turface. I filled in the hole with the mixture and set the new tree so that the tips of the roots extend just slightly below grade. I then piled the mixture up to form a 3' wide hill on top of it. At the center, it is ~10" high, after pressing it down. I then piled on a few more inches of wood chips. Hopefully it will do better than its predecessor.

Hi Sophie , First the young pink Cherry Blossum trees , are they new ones growing away from the tree or are they up close to the tree or out in the lawn or on the tree trunk? If they are, usually they are suckers and may or may not grow true . A lot of nurseries that do the initial grafting use apple trees for the root and up to where the graft is performed. What that means is that is most fruit trees are grafted onto other tree roots and trunk . If the suckers are growing above the graft they may be cherry , if below the graft they would be whatever variety of tree the nursery used for grafting . If they have been grown from seed then perhaps they can be dug with their own root stalk . They should be able to be divided and may come true . More info on Cherry Tree suckers can be found here in some informative discussions http://www.growsonyou.com/question/show/12695-problem-with-the-roots-of-my-cherry-tree You could try rooting these suckers but my thoughts are it would take a long time to get roots even with a number 3 rooting hormone usually used for woody plants. It would require taking the cutting , dipping in the hormone , planting and firming the earth around the cutting and then somehow keeping it covered with a bottle or a clear lid and keeping the soil uniformly moist (never let it dry out ) and once you see new growth you would know it is rooted. It definitely would take some time . Second I am curious to know which Rose of Sharon you are talking about with yellow blooms and that do not grow like a tree. Can you send a picture please . The only Rose of Sharon I am aware of are small trees. So you have my curiousity aroused. Bleeding hearts should be fairly straight forward , Dig , pull plant out and divide . There maybe individual plants in the clump it would require taking a good look ( washing off some of the dirt ) to see . If it is all one plant you can slice through the root taking care not to damage the brittle roots . Actually there was a discussion about this on gardenweb in 2006 here is the link : http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/2153394/bleeding-hearts-getting-too-big-when-how Hope this helps and I hope to find out about yellow Rose of Sharon plants??? Signet

Iseltzer: We have jap beatles all around me yet luckily so far, they are not in big numbers where I am at. 30 miles away they are horrendous so I suppose some day they will be a problem for me. I grow grapes too so I hope they stay away. When they come, I will try carbaryl since I heard it is supposed to work great on jap beatles. I grow tart cherries too and find I must net at the first sign of pink on the fruits. If you wait a few days longer, it will be amazing how much of the crop just vanishes to birds. Even with a net I got one crafty robin who always walked around the tree every morning and finally found some way in. Very hard to remove the birds once inside the netting. Thankfully I only had that happen twice. Never did find any opening how it got in. My biggest pest with cherries is birds. I do spray for curculio, cherry fruit fly, cherry leaf spot (if and when it happens). I do not spray once the tree is netted so I have had an outbreak or two of powdery mildew if we get very cloudy and rainy weather for a long period at this stage but it was only bad once and more so on some varieties than others. Cuculio season here runs potentially from petal fall to about mid-June. Just before I net, I like to spray one last time at the first sign of pink on any fruit and that seems to do the trick for me (only found one larvae in all the fruit I picked and pitted over the years). If I get leafspot, I will spray chlorothalonil AFTER harvest as not cleared for cherries after shuck-split stage in spring. Not a huge issue so far except for one year and again definite differences in susceptibility based on variety. Most of this pertains to my tart cherries since I have only tried growing sweets the past few years. I do not think they will be much different that the tarts as far as birds,insects and disease issues except that I avoid using Imidan insecticide on the sweets due to phytotoxicity.