Now that the digging up time is only a couple months away, I need assurance that my plan is okay, and if not some advice on how to better accomplish these two trees' move.

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Fall of 2004 I planted these trees in a triangle pattern. At that time, they were three, 5-6 foot tall, single trunked 5 gallon sized potted Heritage Birch trees. They were planted only about two feet apart, and they each were staked. It was a wet fall where about 2 inches of standing water lingered under the trees. At the time of planting when I dug the holes, I discovered that the soil in the planting bed, proved to be a nearly solidly, water, packed silty loam. Even with using a long rounded tiped, trench shovel, digging the planting holes were almost more than I could handle.

At the beginning of 2005's summer, I removed the stakes all at once. Even though we had received, what seemed to be, a nice amount of spring rains; the trees immediately went into shock. All summer long they tried to recover, but by early fall of 2005 I had to cut some of the trunks back to almost 3 feet high. Then the fall of 2005 offered them adequate moisture, so all my birch trees seemed to bounce back and recover; to the point that I expected them to coninue growing nicely, or even better after the expected upcoming Spring rains.

They did seem to bounce back that fall and go into dormancy properly. Only thing is that, during the following winter it did not rain. Then once the following spring rains came and the winter drought broke enough for the brich trees to break dormancy and releaf nicely; this promising period, was followed by these birch trees being shocked again from a late freeze, which occured in mid april of 2006. that 2006 year's spring rains ended early and for the rest of 2006 the area experienced drought conditons. The brich trees struggled to stay alive, but they still just managed to do that, most likely due to the neighbor's needing to water their yard enough so the trees managed to find just barely enough water. By February of 2007 we remained in a deep drought contition that had signifacantly lowered the water table, but March of 2007 arrived and the drought broke with seemingly never ending daily rain events. With all this moisturee the Birch trees quickly releafed and seemed to be putting on new top growth, until Easter of 2007 when a late, hard freeze hit.

In early May of 2007, it was a few weeks after the spring temps had warmed up again, I visited the trees, and at that time determined that enough of the main trunks had died, to create the need for me to prune away those dead trunks; all the way down to the rootball. At that time there were new suckers growing up out of the rootball, so I left them to keep growing. Later I come back and select the strongest growers, for becoming each tree's new main leader trunks. Several times after that I went out to check them and I had to keep pruning away the more weakly growing suckers.

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Now, in late July, 2007 and just after our many months of excessive rains, those new main leaders have grown to a height of 4 - 5 feet tall. They are hardening off nicely, and I have let all the leafing on those trunks remain, so they currently do not have cleaned off legs with a top of canopy.

This brings me up to my question, how evermore the trunks continue to grow this summer and in the upcoming fall, I want to dig up two of the birch trees as soon as they go dormant this coming fall. One of them will be a single trunk birch and the other will be a clumped 3 trunked birch.

Will I be Okay to dig them up as bare roots trees, pot them-up, bury the pots in a good quality and well draining sandy loam soil, and over winter them there? Then later, after they rethaw in 2008, dig up the pots and carefully tend to them until the following fall of 2008; when I want to transplant them into their planting beds.

Do my above described plans seem reasonable enough, or would it be better for me to dig them up and B & B their rootballs, for immediately moving them to their new planting beds; with my doing all this by no later than November of this year, 2007?