Bare root seedlings from Arbor Day Foundation

I will be receiving several bare root seedlings, primarily maples and elms, from the Arbor Day Foundation in early November and I am looking for advice on the best course of action. These are the options I am considering, and I am very open to other suggestions:

1. Plant the seedlings in the ground as is
   
2. Cut the tap root off the seedlings and plant them in the ground, per http://www.evergreengardenworks.com/rootprsd.htm
   
3. Plant the seedlings in the ground positioned in a 12" tile with a hole drilled in it
   
4. Plant the seedlings in the ground with a wire tourniquet
   

I am leaning towards option 3 because I feel like this option has the best combination of plant survivability and nebari development, but that is an assumption as I have no experience with any of these techniques.

I am also interested in your experiences with the Arbor Day Foundation as it seems to be a good place for affordable bare root stock.

Do you know which maples and elms you will be getting? November seems an odd time to receive bare-root seedlings. Here in the east, we get ours in early spring, no matter when we ordered (joined) them.

If you get out there what we get here, what you receive will be foot-long whips, about pencil thickness, with almost an equal length of root. There may be vestigial branches or there may not be.

If you have the space, ground planting over a tile (what is the purpose of the hole????) may be your best option because these will need to do a lot of growing. You probably will need to cut the root, because what you get usually is a single long root with a few side roots. However, the side roots may not be long enough to spread out. In that case, growth in a pot for a year might be the preferred option and THEN plant over the tile.

Good luck. I have been almost universally unhappy with Arbor Day trees -- at least as bonsai. I have a couple of nice redbud growing in my front yard, through. And I do have my weeping hawthorn which I've posted here recently, tho I tried that in the yard for a few years first.

I joined this past spring and ordered a number of trees. They looked OK when they arrived but I had a high failure rate...many of them never even leafed out after planting. We did have some difficult weather this spring, but I don't know if I that contributed. I won't be ordering from them again.

Red maple, Silver maple, Sugar maple and lacebark elm are the specific types of trees. I read somewhere that lacebark elm was the same thing as Chinese elm, but I am not sure.

The point of the hole in the tile as I understand it is to allow the tap root to be fed through and continue nourishing the tree as it grows, but not allow the tap root to get any larger than the hole. The hole would be small, maybe 1/4 inch.

It sounds like I shouldn't get my hopes too high for this round of trees.

I have received several from them over the years and they mostly do fine. It is important to note that some bare root species require "sweating" or they won't break bud. They do have exceptional customer service if they arrive in really poor shape. As you noted in your first post, I followed Brent's instruction on his site http://www.evergreengardenworks.com/rootprsd.htm

I also planted the taproots as root cuttings with pretty decent success. Overall it is not a bad way to get trees, I have just found better ways.

I am not familiar with the term "sweating," do you have a link to an explanation?

Here is one link that I found just by doing a search:

http://www.ca.uky.edu/HLA/Dunwell/LnrSweat.html

Here is a pretty good .pdf doc
http://www.utextension.utk.edu/mtnpi/handouts/General/Sweating_to_Break_Plant_Dormancy.pdf