What's up everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about a piece of terminology that a lot of people might not be familiar with and that would be a bare root plant

So this is something that I recently became a little bit better

acquainted with when I was buying sweet potato slips and so we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about what are bare root plants and why would you buy them? Why would you use

them versus just maybe growing and starting your own? But before we do that, we're going to talk about

Garden Maker who are the official sponsor of the Epic Gardening Podcast.

So what Gardenmaker does is they make organic natural fertilizers

that either are custom blended for you

based on what you want in them or they have these

signature blends that they've already custom formulated for specific purposes like

lawn care herbs vegetables tomatoes roses. If you want and you are very, very well versed in what your

soil needs, you can actually even just buy pounds of their individual ingredients.

You could buy organic feather meal, organic bone meal on a per pound basis too.

So there's a lot of optionality there, which is pretty cool. So with that, let's get back into the topic which are bareroot plants.

The definition of a bareroot plant is pretty simple. It's a plant that has been removed from the soil.

Bare roots, the roots are exposed. So nurseries will dig plants from in-ground beds after the plants have entered a more dormant

stage. Then they'll shake or wash the soil from the roots and then pack them in a material that

retains moisture like shredded paper or peat moss or maybe very finely ground wood shavings.

For a bare root perennial, what a grower will usually do is they will prune the plant's top growth to about an inch or so.

And so they'll do this and then they'll store those plants

so that they stay dormant.

So then they can sell these plants to you

...