Is it dead or dying? Your online tree order arrived.

You ordered your tree online vs going to the local tree nursery, you get it in the mail and it looks like its either dead or dying. What to do? The problem with new trees is not the tree itself but yourself. You look at it thinking this looks dead. Sometimes you get lucky when the tree arrives. You get it with leaves and just need water and its ready to go. Sometimes you get a twig. Its only got a few leaves coming out, leaves are small compared to your other trees. You start nitpicking it, trying to find out what is wrong with it. Well most likely its just fine. Patience is a virtue but most humans lack in both virtue and patience. What to look for if its actually not doing well? Well if you’re an expert you’ll know, but to an amateur arborist we start digging into information online, look at videos and dive into an incredible amount of information. We find diseases that our trees could get and we start panicking.

My Apricot Twig, first year that’s all it could do.

So here is my advice; don’t do anything after you planted it, well yes water the twig, but just let it relax. Give it time. Heck you can even play music for it if you think that’ll help. I heard Vivaldi makes plants relax and grow. Don’t fertilize, we’ll get to that later. I also hope you scratch tested it as well, if its green and not dried out, its fine, it might just be taking a long nap. In some cases you do get trees that are dead, but some trees you cant tell, so I say just plant it and give it a try.

I got a white oak twig in the mail once. I thought it was dead, I still planted it. Its doing pretty good, survived a hail storm, lost its leaves three times, once for shipping, then heat scorch and hail. It grew new leaves just recently.

Your tree will sometimes look pathetic. You might think its dead. You might want to send it back for replacement or do something like yell at customer service etc.. etc..

Northern Pin Oak from a local nursery, looks good doesn’t it, but its having a hard time adjusting.

My only recommendation is just to plant it and give it a try.. You might get a really strong tree out of it, it just needs a little more time. A year ago I purchased 3 northern purple plum bushes. They looked great when I planted them. The next winter two of them didn’t grow, I decided to replace them, which I did. However the other two, I did not toss. I put them it pots, cut them down to the root and voila, yes they are bushes and not trees. However, they can be pruned into tree shape if need be. Roughly 6 months later they started growing again. The tops just died because we had a really cold winter and they weren’t adjusted to the climate. Also there wasn’t any snow cover. All of them needed to acclimate, originally grown in Oregon, well it doesn’t get to -30 F in Oregon, up in the mountains but I doubt they grow the nursery stock there.

Also don’t forget, if you planted this in the fall, make sure to put some sort of rodent protection around your fruit trees. Rabbits in the wintertime like to eat the bark, then you end of having a dead tree in the spring.