Success when planting trees is something we all want to experience, and nothing is more important to assuring your successful tree planting than selecting trees that have healthy, properly structured and power packed root systems.

When they are properly raised, harvested, and maintained up to planting time, traditional balled and burlapped trees in a wire basket with a burlap liner can be successful, and offer the opportunity to plant a good sized tree.  Drawbacks of balled and burlapped trees are higher cost, weights of 300-1000 pounds, greater transplant shock, and a 2-3 year time period until the tree becomes established enough to regain a vibrant appearance.

Planting bare root trees is an excellent and economical way to get trees planted and be able to prune the roots prior to planting in order to assure good root structure.  Drawbacks to planting bare root trees directly into your landscape are generally smaller size, significant transplant shock, higher failure rates, fairly long time for establishment, and a very short period of about three weeks each spring when bare root trees are available and can be planted.

Container trees are trees that have become established in a plastic nursery pot, and this type of packaging has become very popular over the last several decades.  The reasons for this popularity are that container trees are generally a bit larger than bare root trees, are easy to handle and transport, fall into an affordable price range, suffer les transplant shock, establishe fairly quickly when proper planting technique is used, and have high success rates.  In Minnesota, container trees can be successfully panted from early April to late November, which presents a huge 8 month long window of opportunity.

Not all container trees are created equal.  In standard plastic nursery pots with solid side walls and 4-6 drain holes in the bottom, it is easy for roots to circle around inside the pot, and become root bound.  If the person planting the root bound tree fails to ultra-aggressively root prune the matted roots to eliminate all circling of roots on the outside of the root ball, there is a fairly high probability the tree will fail to develop a properly structured root system and will gradually decline and die.  When matted roots are aggressively shredded or removed prior to planting, long term results can be good, but transplant shock is significant.

Happily there are container trees being produced that have almost perfect root systems, transplant easily and establish quickly, and maintain a vibrant appearance right from the first day they are planted into your landscape.  These container trees are produced in a very special type of plastic nursery pot that has dozens of open slots in the sidewalls and bottom that air root prune the roots of the tree as it becomes established in the pot.  The result is an almost perfectly structured root system, with far more fine hair roots to reduce transplant shock, more stored energy to push new growth as soon as the tree is planted, high success rates, and very little chance of developing stem girdling roots that could cause the tree to have problems 10-20 years after planting. These air root pruned container trees are very affordable, and because of the wonderful performance they deliver, we are seeing a growing number of customers who come back and specifically request trees grown in the air root pruning pots.  At Knecht’s Nurseries and Landscaping, we call our trees in air root pruning containers Peak Performance Trees.  We offer Knecht’s Peak Performance Trees in pot sizes from one gallon to 30 gallons and heights of 6 inches to 16 feet tall.  Our huge inventory of Peak Performance Trees offers a wide choice of varieties and sizes to fit almost any budget and application.

We invite you to stop in and see for yourself the great selection of Peak Performance Trees we offer in state of the art air root pruning containers.  Prices range from $12.99 to $259 and everything in between.