What To Do When Your Trees Arrive

A Planting & Care Guide

Thank you for purchasing our fruit trees and other fruiting plants. We are a fledgling company whose mission is to increase local food production capacity for Montana and beyond, and your purchase directly supports that mission. Follow the guide below to give you and your plants the best chance of success.

On this page: When Your Trees Arrive · If You Can't Plant Right Away · Planting · Watering the First Year · Slow-to-Wake Trees · Paint the Trunks White · Guard Against Voles, Gophers & Ground Squirrels · Hardening Off for Winter · Protecting Trees for Winter · Pruning · Training Limbs Out, Not Up

When Your Trees Arrive

Open the package carefully and inspect the plants. We take great care in packaging our trees for shipment, so they should be planted as soon as possible after they arrive.

If You Can't Plant Right Away

Plant within a few days of receiving your trees. If something comes up and you can't, keep them in good condition using these steps:

Check the sawdust around the roots. It should be damp, not dried out. Moisten it if needed, and never let the roots dry out.
Store the trees in their box in a cool, sheltered spot such as an unheated barn or garage. 33 to 40°F is ideal, and make sure the area never drops below 33°F. If it's running warmer than that, plant sooner.
Plant as soon as you can.

Don't worry if you're still seeing frost. These trees are dormant, or mostly dormant (hardened off), and have no soft, vulnerable non-woody tissue. They ain't tomatoes.

Planting

Soak the roots. Soak trees and shrubs in water for 2 to 24 hours before planting, but no longer.
Dig the hole. Make it at least as big as the root system, or larger. We aim for about 1.5 times the root diameter.
Roughen the walls of the hole. Digging with a shovel, auger, or excavator bucket compacts the interior walls of the hole. Take a shovel and dig toward the hole from just outside it to roughen up that inner wall. This makes it easier for roots to penetrate.
Amend the soil. Use about ⅓ compost to native soil, plus bone meal (or whole bones for slower decay and mineralization). Do not put any nitrogen fertilizer in the planting hole. That goes for any plant. A couple caveats: in heavy clay, go light on the compost or skip it, since a loose, amended hole in clay can hold water like a bucket. And bone meal does the most on acidic soil. On alkaline or calcareous ground, which is a lot of the West, it barely breaks down, so get a soil test first. It can also draw dogs and skunks to dig up a new tree.
Set the roots. Spread the roots out in all directions as much as possible. It's better to prune the roots than to bend them into too small a hole.
Plant at the right depth. Plant at the same depth the tree grew at in the nursery. To find the old soil line, moisten your finger and rub the trunk just below the graft. There should be a fairly drastic color change where soil and air used to meet. (The graft is the crook 4 to 10 inches above the roots, though on some of our trees the graft union sits higher.) Amended backfill settles, so set the tree a touch high and keep the graft a couple inches above the soil once things settle.
Mulch well. Good weed control and regular watering during dry spells are critical. We use copious amounts of mulch. Hardwood is preferred, but softwood is just fine if that's all you can find. Keep it pulled back a foot or more from the trunk, though. Mulch piled against the trunk is basically building the voles a house.
Paint and guard the trunk. Paint the trunk white and put a hardware cloth guard on before the first winter. Both are covered just below.

Watering the First Year

Newly set-out plants need regular watering through their first year.

Give at least one deep watering per week, and preferably twice a week during the heat of summer. Sandy soil may need more.
Drip irrigation is our go-to here in Montana.
When in doubt, give more water rather than less, unless you have heavy clay soil or it rains all the time. In years of doing this, we've seen only one overwatered tree, and that was a burst pipe leaving it in standing water. Granted, this is dry Montana.

Best of all, develop your internal calibrator: dig down into the soil and feel it. Is it moist or dry? Dry soil is hard to rehydrate, and in early and midsummer you do not want the terminal buds to set (stop growing), which is a sign the tree isn't getting enough water. Keep an eye on it. (Come late August, bud set is exactly what you want. See hardening off below.)

Slow-to-Wake Trees

Some plants are slow to break dormancy after transplanting. The stone fruits (peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums) can sometimes wait until mid-summer to leaf out. To check whether a quiet tree is still alive, scrape the bark on the trunk just above the graft with a fingernail or knife. If you see green tissue underneath, be patient: the tree is alive. If it's brown there, check higher up a branch too. Green below the graft only tells you the rootstock is alive.

Paint the Trunks White

This one is super important. On sunny winter afternoons, the sun (and the snow bouncing it back up) heats the south and southwest side of the trunk way above the air temperature. When the sun drops, that bark freezes fast and dies. That's sunscald, and it can kill a big share of a young trunk. Paint the trunk from the ground up to the lowest branches with white latex paint thinned about half with water, and get it on going into winter. Touch it up each fall while the tree is young.

Our trunk painting guide has the full recipe, when to paint and a step-by-step how-to.

Guard Against Voles, Gophers & Ground Squirrels

Voles, pocket gophers and ground squirrels go after bark and roots at the base of the trunk, and voles do most of it in winter, tunneling under the snow where you can't see it. They'll chew anywhere from the soil line up to the snow line. Put a guard of 1/4" hardware cloth around the trunk at planting, or in fall before the snow at the latest. Make it at least two feet high and well taller than your deepest snow, stand it about 6 inches out from the trunk, and really nudge the bottom edge at least 2 to 3 inches down into the soil so nothing slips under. Most wildlife folks say to go about 6 inches, since voles will burrow under a shallow edge, so if your soil lets you, deeper is better, especially where ground squirrels dig. Keep grass, weeds and mulch pulled back a foot or more from the trunk. Voles hate crossing open ground, though once there's snow on it they'll go anywhere, so the guard is what really saves the tree.

Our hardware cloth guard guide walks through making and installing one, plus what to do where gophers are bad.

Hardening Off for Winter

For Montana growers and anyone in zone 4 or colder, you need to shut the trees' metabolism down and encourage hardening off before winter. This matters most in the early years of a tree's life.

Start tapering off water in mid-August and stop watering altogether by late August. It may still be hot then, but first frost can be a month away and serious sub-zero cold about two months away.
Do not fertilize through the roots past July. Late root-fed nutrients can keep the tree's metabolism from shutting down.
Foliar nutrient sprays (fed through the leaves) can be applied until early August.

Protecting Trees for Winter

Give one final drink after leaf drop so there's enough moisture to carry the tree through winter.

In cold areas, the most important protection is choosing the right variety and then the right site. Avoid depressions and frost pockets, look for good air drainage, favor higher spots on the landscape, and steer clear of windy areas. Not sure what's hardy where you are? The cold hardiness calculator gives you the coldest night to plan for at your address, and the microclimate maps show where cold air settles.

We live in a cold, erratic climate, so for tender varieties (nectarine, peach and some apricots), take extra precautions. Zone 4 growers should protect these, and if you're really cold you may want to do the same for other varieties during the first few years. Wrap the tree in a way that lets ground heat rise around the trunk:

Place a tree guard about 6 inches out in circumference from the trunk, leaving a gap so ground heat can flow around the trunk.
Make sure it doesn't trap moisture and rot the trunk.
Remove it in early April.

This guards against sunscald and cold, drying winter wind. From what we've seen, thicker-diameter wood is more susceptible to wind chill damage but more resilient to extreme low temperatures. (Strictly speaking, wind can't chill a tree below the air temperature. It dries wood out. So that damage on thicker trunks is most likely frost cracking or southwest injury, from the big temperature swings across a thick trunk.)

A 1/4" hardware cloth guard set 6 inches out does the rodent job and breathes, so it won't trap moisture, and it can stay on year-round. It won't stop sun, though, so paint the trunk too.

Pruning

Some roots are inevitably lost in the nursery digging process, so growth is better if the top is pruned to compensate. Most plants can be pruned at planting time: cut any broken branches, damaged roots, and dead wood back to healthy wood. If your trees were shipped, they likely don't need much more pruning than that.

Bare Root Fruit Trees

Side branches can be cut back by half or more. Prune back to a bud on the underside of the limb, cutting about ⅓ inch beyond the bud as the limb heads upward.
To grow a big tree, remove unwanted low branches now.
To keep a tree compact when there are few low branches, make a heading cut low on the leader, just above where you want branches to form, about ⅓ inch above a bud on the main stem. Always prune above the graft so the tree doesn't revert to the rootstock. Keep it small later with summer pruning (likely not for several years).
For whips (trees without limbs), make a heading cut at breast height. On dwarfs and peaches, go lower, about 24 to 36 inches, so the scaffolds start closer to the ground.

Training Limbs Out, Not Up

You want limbs to grow outward, not straight up. All fruit tree limbs naturally reach for the sky, so it's our job to keep pruning back to a bud on the underside (just before that upward trend) to push the limb outward, or to use limb spreaders.

We like plastic limb spreaders, specifically the Zhupoub brand on Amazon. The wooden ones are handy when you need a bit more reach. (Update: we had 50 mph gusts on 4/7/26 and they didn't blow off. Under tension they stay put. Once you're done with one limb, just move it to another.)
Aim for a crotch angle of 45 to 60 degrees on all scaffold limbs, no narrower than 45 and no wider than 60. This eases harvest later, lets more sunlight into the canopy (which helps with disease), and prevents included bark and a weak joint that can crack a scaffold limb into the trunk under a heavy fruit load, snow on leaves, etc.
Avoid limbs that cross, and give each limb enough room above and below. You want to be able to throw your neighbor's cat through the tree if it's a dwarf, a goat if it's a semi-dwarf, and a calf if it's a standard full-size tree.

Good luck, and please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns about your order. Thanks for reading, and happy growing!

MFTC