As soon as any unsold Christmas trees move out of nurseries, bare root plants move in. Like Christmas trees, bare root plants are available within a limited season, while they are dormant through winter. They will all be gone by the time they start blooming and producing new foliage at the end of winter.

Bare root plants of course have ‘bare roots’, without typical media (potting soil) contained within cans or pots. Some get their roots wrapped in lightweight coarse sawdust to keep them moist without too much bulk. Others get their roots heeled into moist sand in nurseries, so that they can simply be dug when purchased.

Because bare root plants need much less space than canned (potted) plants, many more different kinds of deciduous fruit trees, roses, grapes, berries and even a few ornamentals are available. Bare root plants also cost about half as much as typical canned plants.

Since no nursery can stock all of what is available, more varieties are available from mail order catalogues and online. Most of what is available in local nurseries is selected for local climates. Plants purchased from catalogues or online need to be selected accordingly.

A main advantage of bare root plants is that they get established in the garden more efficiently than typical canned (potted) plants do. They get dug, transported and replanted into the garden all while dormant. By the time they wake up in spring, they are already in their new home, where they immediately adapt and start to disperse their roots into relatively uniform soil. Canned plants have confined roots that must disperse into unfamiliar garden soil

Bare root plants should get into the garden as soon as possible. If they do not get planted immediately, plants that were pulled from sand in nurseries should get heeled into damp soil or mulch, and watered to settle the fill. Alternatively, they can wait with their roots in buckets of water for a day to two. Bare root plants that are wrapped in bags of sawdust should be safe for more than a week in the shade outside.

Planting holes should be just large enough to accommodate the roots. If too deep, the loosened soil below is likely to settle and sink. Soil can be mounded into a small cone (known as a ‘volcano’) in the middle of each hole to spread roots over. Graft unions (seen as kinks low on trunks of fruit trees or where rose plants branch) of grafted plants should stand above the surface of the soil. Backfill soil should only be amended lightly, if at all.

Even though dormant plants get more moisture than they need from rain through winter, freshly planted bare root plants should get soaked twice immediately after planting to settle the soil around their roots. Lastly, damaged or superfluous stems can be pruned off. Most bare root fruit trees have much more stems than they should for padding in transportation and to allow more options for pruning.

Now that nurseries and garden centers are no longer selling Christmas trees, they have plenty of room for bare root stock. All sorts of deciduous fruit trees, a few deciduous shade trees, shrubs and vines, and even a few perennials can now be purchased while dormant and without the cumbersome media (soil) that the roots need at all other times of the year. Not only is bare root stock easier to handle and transport in small cars, but it is also much less expensive than canned stock (that has roots contained in media, which is contained in nursery cans). Bare root stock typically costs about a third of what canned stock costs.

Bare root stock also has the advantage of adapting to new garden easier, since it does not need to leave the comfort zone of the media that it would have grown into (within a can) in order to venture out into unfamiliar soil. Instead, it starts to disperse roots into the new home soil immediately as it emerges from dormancy in late winter. Without cans, bare root stock can not get root bound. Instead of developing branch structure that is appealing to nursery marketing, bare root stock can get an early start on developing branch structure that is most practical and efficient for the gardens that it gets installed into.

It seems that all of the ´stone’ fruit can be found as bare root stock. These include apricot, cherry, plum, prune, peach, nectarine, almond (which is the seed, or ´stone’, of a peach like fruit) and the odd hybrids of these. The pomme fruits, apple, pear and quince, are perhaps the second most popular of bare root stock, although quince is still rather rare. Ornamental trees, shrubs and vines include flowering crabapple, flowering cherry, flowering quince, alder, poplar, willow, lilac, forsythia, wisteria and clematis. Perennials include rhubarb and artichoke.

Bare root stock can be purchased as soon as it becomes available, but does not do much until it starts to grow in spring. It should get planted quickly and soaked in, but will get more water than it needs from rain afterward. It should not need water again until after it blooms or gets new leaves in late winter or early spring. Despite guarantees of fruit in the first year, none should be expected. The few fruit trees that might set fruit will probably produce only useless underdeveloped fruit because new plants are busy producing new roots and growing. Actually though, this apples to canned stock as well, except only for citrus, olives and other evergreen fruit trees.