Bailey from TN Nursery shows how to check if bare-root plants are alive. Scratch the bark with a fingernail: white with a green tint means living, black or brown means dead. For roots and stems, firm is alive, soft and mushy is dead.
Chapters
Hey everyone, it's Bailey with TN Nursery, and today I want to show you the difference between a dead plant and a living plant. These are trees right here, and this is how you do the scratch test to see if your tree's alive. You can take a quarter or your fingernail or whatever, and you do the scratch test. And you just see right— this right here, it's white and it's got a green tint to it. It's alive and well. And here's another tree right here. You see how I do that scratch test and it's just scratching black and brown? This is a dead tree, okay? Now I'm going to show you how to do perennials, how to decipher between living and dead perennials. You see, this is a living perennial. It has buds on it, but it's springtime here. Sometimes, most of the time, they won't have buds on them. It'll just look like this, but it's firm. It ain't mushy. And that's how you tell if a perennial's alive. And here's a dead one. You can see it's mushy. These are Virginia bluebells. All roots look different. But see how this is mushy? That it's not alive. And all roots look different. What you tell is the difference is between a soft and a hard root. Hard's alive. Here's a fern. It has fawns coming out it. Most of the time they won't have this because we sell dormant stuff, but they know that it's becoming spring here and it's firm. See, it's really, really hard and it is alive. And then here's a dead one right here. You can see there's no fawns, but most of them won't have it, but it's just mushy, you see. It's just mushy. That's the difference. That's how you can tell between a dead plant and a living plant.
