The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Transplant in fall or spring?

transplanting a Golden Muscat grapeMy great aunt Ruth Tirrell wrote for Organic Gardening magazine long before I was born, and I often peruse her old articles (which I don't think can be found on the internet) when making decisions about my own garden.  In "Fall --- A Good Time to Transplant", she discusses the pros and cons of planting in the fall and spring.  She is all for planting strawberries, cherries, apples, and pears in the fall, though warns to plant peaches and blueberries in the spring.  (She wavers on raspberries and grapes.)

From everything I've read, planting in fall is a great idea in most cases.  You give the plant time to get its roots established and often don't need to do any watering right away --- many books will tell you that planting in fall gives you the equivalent of an extra season's growth.  Perusal of the internet finds varying opinions on whether even peaches, blueberries, raspberries, and grapes do better with fall transplanting.

I have a hard time waiting until spring, so I've been setting out my new grapes this afternoon.  I rationalize that my great aunt lived in Boston (although, in actuality, I'm in the same zone due to our mountains.)  As I dug, I was stunned by the root system on some of our grapes --- Mark took a photo of the biggest one.  This plant started as a ten inch cutting only 8 months ago!



Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.