How to plant bare root shrubs and trees

Garden Ninja shows you how to successfully plant bare root shrubs in this handy guide. Using Sloe bushes as the example. http://www.gardenninja.co.uk. Bareroots are a really cheap way of planting up your garden on a budget and are great for hedging plants.

Bare roots are a really easy way to buy a much wider range of fruit bushes and plants. This how-to guide shows you the easiest way to plant them for success. Why not expand your garden with bare root shrubs and plants?

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Video Extract: Today I'm going to be showing you how to plant bare root bushes here in a raised bed. Now some friends of mine kindly got me this gift here, from the Glutenous gardeners what it comprises of is 3 bare root Prunus spinosa, which are sloe berries to me and you! Which you can make Sloe gin out of, my friends also know I love gin so its kind of a bit of a contrived present! But I can't wait to get these planted up so I thought I'd do a video to show you how you plant these three very small bare roots into a raised bed and how best to bring them on. SO let's get cracking!

So what you're going to need today is a bucket and what I have done here is filled it full of rainwater for the rain butt and what we are going to do before we eagerly throw this plants it, which is what most people probably think 'lets get these in' because they are bare root they are dormant and what that means is that the plant is in a rest state or a state of stasis or sleep and its important that we slowly 'wake them up' we do that by putting the bare roots in water and leaving them for maybe half an hour and hour and what will happen then is the roots will 'imbibe' which means they will take on the water and start to hydrate the plant and give it that feeling that springs coming, which technically it is, and then wake the plants up. If you put them straight in you run the risk they will struggle to imbibe and find that water quickly given the fact that the roots are so small, so what we are basically doing is giving them the best chance to get going.

Rain water is a great example of reusing earths resources rather than tap water, it's also better for the plants as well. What I'm going to do now is to unwrap these bare roots now and put them in the water. So these have come in a hessian sack which is quite nice it also means that the roots can breathe which is really important because all plants need air as well as water, so we are going to gently remove them from this bag, they should be wrapped up, here we go. They have been wrapped up in this cling film, so carefully unwrap them, you can actually see on this one its started to wake up already with these tiny shoots but they are still technically dormant.

So there should be a small amount of soil on these. You can see its very dry so lets pry these carefully apart can you see that, so we have one, two, three, there is a tag here with the name on, Prunus spinosa, which is the latin name for the Sloe bush, it's also known as Black Thorn one thing to bare in mind with Black Thorn is that they do have thorns, the clue is in the name Black Thorn! They can be quite vicious so you would want to be careful if you were putting these in a place where children play or maybe people that maybe brushing past them, so I'm putting them in this raised bed at the side of a house where all my other fruit bushes are.

It will also act as a bit of a deterrent if anyone tries to sneak over or decides to come steal some fruit! So I'm going to pop these in here and then leave them for half an hour to imbibe that water and then come back. Ok so it's been about an hour now so I think thats enough now to get them started, so what I'm going to do is carefully lift them out and put them on the side of this raised bed and then work out the spacing for where I'm going to plant them.

So what I'm doing now is carefully lifting these out of the water now they have been in there for an hour and making sure to support the root ball I'm going to pop them on the side here being careful not to put them under too much stress. I'll save that water for later because I'll use it to fill the watering can and water them. What I'm going to do now is to space them equally in this bed, so I’ve already worked out that is big enough to hold them and what I want to do is when they grow to grow them into almost like a screen or hedge which is why I'm planting them closer together rather than if you wanted them as a bush you could walk around.