Today I went to our local Wal-mart( I know a lot of you don't care for Walmart but---)and they were unloading a truck full of fruit trees. Since I have been working my orchard and buying trees--I decided to look at the trees! They were beautiful, 5 to 6 feet tall, 2gallon pots and they are the same varieties that I have purchased at our local nursery and ordered from catalogs --for HALF of what I had paid for them!!!I purchased 1 "Celestial" fig, 1 "Brown Turkey" fig, 1 "Montley" plum, 1 "Bartlett" pear and 1 "Belle of Georgia" peach for less than $67.00 and that was with tax! They also have several kinds of apple, peach,plum,pear,lots of berries and flowering cherry and crab apple! Just thought that you might want to check out your local Wallie World!

-- Debbie T in N.C. (rdtyner@mindspring.com), January 25, 2001

Answers

I am with you - WallyWorld has excellent nursery stock. Most of my "stuff" comes from there and is usually priced much cheaper. I have had good luck with the things that I have been careful about buying. I have a complaint with them and most "nurserys" in that they sell stuff that just won't grow in the area that it's being sold in. I always have to look at the temp tolerances. It was dumb of me but I learned it the hard way through some losses.

-- cindy palmer (jandcpalmer@sierratel.com), January 25, 2001.

We've gotten a number of good, viable bare root trees from Eagle (Lowe's) as well. Last year they had a bunch of grafted trees with three to five varieties of a particular kind of fruit, and I think they were around $16. I've seen them for just about twice that in the catalogs.

-- Laura Jensen (lrjensen@nwlink.com), January 26, 2001.

I worked at a Lowes in OKC was promoted to nursery specialist in less than 9 months, they tryed to get me to take zone manager,left because I remarried. The trees/plants we got came off the very same truck, and from the very same place as wal-mart and Home Depot, there were times we had to pull wal-mart tags and bar codes off to sell our plants. We had so many customers that thought there was a difference. Be sure to check the roots, alot have circled roots from being in the pot too long, and if you buy large trees/plants dig around in the pot to get a good look at the roots way too many were root bound and replanted in a larger pot (for more money of course) with no new growth in the pot just more dirt/ more money. Thumper

-- Thumper (slrldr@aol.com), January 26, 2001.

The only beef I have with the WalMart etc stock is that it's fine when you live down in temperate areas. You can likely plant a Delicious apple (altho who would? Yuk.) and have it grow. Up here in zone 3, they sell stuff that would be stretching it to survive in zone 5 out of their stores with little regard for the uninformed shopper. I prefer to buy mine from local people who grew them here. They have a better chance of survival.

-- Julie Froelich (firefly1@nnex.net), January 27, 2001.