Jennifer:

You can move them without fear of losing the tree. What you may lose is any fruit. Some people would say the trees are too young to fruit anyhow. I don't always feel that way just thin very hard.

I've often planted bare root trees that were blooming and starting to leaf out. Haven't lost one yet.

If you have any leaves I would not move them. I have killed a bunch of attempts at that - even small early leaves.

Scott

Peaches, like a lot of fruit varieties, rely heavily on their first flush of root growth, which begins as soon as trees start to push bud. Moving them at the point when they are leafing out does not usually kill them here but it can set them back a year if they are too far along. However, I believe at the stage of your trees you would still get much of the first flush in the new soil

My main experience is with trees directly from the nursery- these I've moved bare root hundreds of times well after they leaf out- moving them from where they are healed in to more permanent locations. This very rarely kills them but they will hardly grow the first season and come out gangbusters the next.

In CA, trees hardly even go dormant, so I'd just go ahead and move the trees- but I'd wait for the current hot spell to pass.

FN, are you taking about under plastic?

My experience is mainly planting trees shipped in that were blooming and leafing when they arrived. This would be in April or even May. But that's not exactly what the question is here.

It's kinda hard to believe you couldn't move a tree the middle of January. But stage of growth is certainly more important than time of year. So if others have had trouble I'd bow to that experience.

I won't want to bare root a tree that was leafing out. But how about moving it with a decent rootball? I'd think that would work with proper watering.

This post was edited by fruitnut on Fri, Jan 17, 14 at 9:51

Thank you all for the responses.

I was unsure of the outcome and did not want to replace them. This weather we are having is just awful for my little orchard. Chill hours are barely at 100. Don't know what to expect for fruit load this year. :(

I was thinking if I could get the trees out without disturbing the rootball badly then all should be good but wanted to double check with my experts! :)

Thanks again guys!

Puggylover75,

I'm close to you over in Hemet, and I'm in shock that my Apricot and Peach trees are blooming now, mid January, and one fig has never gone dormant!! There are bees everywhere! I didn't check the Anna apple (too hard to see from the house), but we had wanted to prune them all, and it appears to be too late. The apple never went dormant at all, and had a small second crop.

Weird, weird weather. I even have wine grapes that are still green!!

It could rain in Feb, but doubtful.

Good luck moving your trees. They are happier moved when dormant, but you are the boss, and they'll just have to get used to that!

Suzi

The key to moving them is to keep the root ball intact and as large as possible. I moved around 15 trees when I changed residences, and was lucky to hire a worker who'd done this commercially. We were trying for root balls 18-24" in diameter, and 18-24" deep. That's a lot of dirt, a lot of digging and they can get very heavy. We dug around and under the trees, slipped burlap under and around the root ball, tied it up good, and used digging bars get leverage under the tree/root ball and lifted, slid and dragged each one onto a 2x10 plank slid underneath. Then we pulled the tree up the incline of the plank to get it out of the hole. Then using more planks we pulled and slid the trees up into the back of a pickup truck.

Since your trees are young, maybe you can get away with smaller root balls, but the larger the root ball the quicker the tree is going to recover.