24 Hybrid Willow Trees. Austree Grows 12 Foot 1st Season. Create Instant Privacy Fence Hedge

These trees are growing great. They sprouted right away in water. I transferred them to pots when they got fairly big. Be careful not to put pots in full sun outside. Put them in a mostly shady place outside at first if you started them in the house. Also, it takes them several days for them to adjust to being transferred from water to soil. Shifting them to full sun when they are not used to it, can overwhelm them too. Of course it was over 90F every day after I set them outside. I watered them twice daily after transferring them to pots. First, they had wilted after transferring to pots and then they perked up and are growing great. We are having a drought right now. I may try to winter them in pots and then, plant in spring. They will be needing lots of water to continue grow well outside. If the drought continues, I think it will be too dry to plant them outside in the soil. There's 24 plants. I would be watering my yard for hours. I am very happy with these trees. Just be careful when you handle them when they first sprout. Their roots and leaves are very fine at first. If you bump them or water them them under a high pressure faucet, you can knock the tiny roots and leaves off. Once they get bigger, they get stronger. I would say if people had problems with the cuttings, maybe the people are not familiar with caring for cuttings. I found the tree cuttings did need much more care than like houseplant cuttings like spider plants. The willow cuttings needed a lot of love and gentle care and much watering to grow well. Also, be careful if you have a lot of pests outside. Insects loved the water I was spraying to water my trees and decided to start eating their leaves. You may need some sort of gentle insecticide. I also worry about deer and rabbits. Once this drought is over, I have a nice patch of land at the rear of my property to plant them that is normally moist. I am looking forward to watching them grow in my yard.

The ad showed many roots, long and growing and many leaves. I got sticks. Almost couldn't distinguish which side as up. No leaves of any kind. Some sticks had very minuscule roots but mostly just sticks. We'll see. If they grow, I update this rating but it will still not be much better. I expect if their honest, they'll replace these sticks with viable plants as advertised. I have them soaking in plastic cups of water in my garage for now until they seem to be acclimated to southern Nevada weather. We'll see. I'll sure let you know. Getting worse every day. I just had a bad batch like 75% of others. The owner wrote spectacular review for their progress but they may have been delusional. After 2 weeks I gave up with 100% failure rate. After 3 weeks last picture I took had no sign of roots or leaves. Seller said they would not pay for return. They paid.

I received them about a month ago. Dipped 2/3 of them in water (used a 1gallon water bottle, just cut off the "neck" part of it so all the sticks fit) and kept them in there for about 3 weeks. Make sure the water level is always at the same height. I was adding about quarter of a cup once in every couple of days. I thought the spring was here so I planted them in ground about a week ago and it went below freezing for 3 days straight since then. Plants are still doing great and growing!! I sprinkled a little bit of Milorganite around them, which I believe is helping out a lot! I placed a water bottle next to it so you can compare the size of it. I hope this helps! Good luck to yall! Month 2 edit 4/5: 23 out of 24 still doing great. I purchased some 1/2 an inch pvc pipe and made my own drip irrigation and connected it to a timer so now the plants are getting 1 minute of very low pressure water in every 6 hours. It is just enough to keep the soil moist at all times, not enough to create a puddle. My estimate is about 2 gallons per cycle so about 8 gallons a day, 240 gallons a month. I pay 35 cents per 100 gallons so it is going to be about a dollar per month for stress free watering. Pretty sweet. Plants are about 3 feet tall already. It is kind of difficult to see it in the picture so I will circle it out. See ya next month! Month 4.5: about half of them are still alive, 2 out if those are about 6 feet tall! they arent full of branches but more like a 6 feet tall stick. I am expecting them to grow out some branches in the fall. it is around 80 at night and 100 in day time at the moment so I am amazed about the fact that about half of them are still alive!

I never write reviews, however I was super skeptical about ordering 50 stems (plants) off amazon. Rated 4 stars because we had shipping issues, however they kept in contact and we received our plants. So I have a black thumb, I actually put the stems in random cup of water for a week in the kitchen with no lights (broke my foot so I couldn’t plant right away) I figured they would die. Came back in town they had roots and sprouts growing!! Yes in a cup of water with literally no sun light what so ever. We planted them in 1 gallon pots with top soil. We watered randomly once every few days. It’s been about a week and a half almost all are growing ! And has many sprouts. We plan to plant them on our property this weekend . We had about 580 ft of privacy fencing so decided to try these out. I will post photos this weekend. We have had these plants now for about 2- almost 3 weeks . They have only been planted in pots for about a week/ week in a half. Photo above is what it looked like after sitting in the dark in water for a week.

We’ve purchased from this company three times, the first two orders were good, we only had one or two casualties from the grouping. Our last purchase was dismal. Three trees died. Half were very slow to root and only gave a few leaves. The other half have very little root and they look like dead sticks. The first two batches received rooted very quickly and when planted they took off really well. The first shipment came 8/2018 and most of the trees are 10 feet or more this summer. The second order came around 6/2019- all those trees are at least three feet or taller. I think we got a bad bunch this time around because they are not rooting or growing the same as the other two bunches and I am treating them the same as the past two orders. The first pic is of the somewhat healthy trees. This is almost at 4 weeks. After two weeks I take them out of the water and put them in these pots of soil and water them for another week or two so they aren’t shocked going into the ground. I gave all of these plants three weeks in the water as they were not taking off like previous batches. This has worked very well in the past. The bad batch picture shows the three dead sticks laying and the other pots with little to no progress. Everything in pots had small stubs of roots when I planted them at three weeks. I am a week into the pots and I am not seeing progress. The healthier batch has grown very little. With previous purchases the plants were booming by now. I know this seller is capable of good product, just asking them to make this right with the bad batch that I received. 1st Update: The seller has replaced the 16 bad trees. I am awaiting the delivery. I will update once the new trees are planted and growing. Thank you Seller for your prompt response. I planted these trees in different growing years, but started in summer of 2018. I’m very happy with the growth rate. They are thick and block mostly everything. The most wonderful thing about these trees is you don’t need to keep reordering if you are willing to wait at least a growing season to plant more. I just cut a twig, put it in water and it grows new shoots within a week. I change out the water regularly and around a month of roots, I put them in post pots and remain indoors keeping a close eye on them for another week or two. At that point I transfer them to the new location. Water the heck out of them morning and evening for the first few weeks. My trees are 30’ tall.

UPDATE #2 - FIVE YEARS LATER: They look all right, not the prettiest, but in my attached photo, this is where they are after 5 years. The trunks don't get very thick, and I imagine they'd be easy to chop down if you're tired of them or want a change. They do offer good shade in the summertime, helping to keep our master bedroom cool. I just wish they grew a bit thicker. (Photo taken in early May) I was sent 24 cuttings, and 23 are alive and well! I live in Seattle. I planted these around February 25, 2020, after just under 2 weeks of rooting in water. I did not wait until the roots got very long. As soon as they started poking out of the cuttings (they'll look like little white dots), I planted them directly in the soil behind my house, 2 feet apart because I want a very dense privacy screen. Now, this is important: WATER THEM!!!!! These WILL survive mild frosts, and there were nights here that got down to 30 F. How did they survive? Because I watered them. When you water the cuttings, the damp soil acts as an insulator and will protect the growing roots against frosty nights, and, possibly one hard freeze (though be careful of too many of the hard freezes). So water, water, water them! I watered each cutting about 20 seconds, or until I felt the soil was nice and saturated. They are in an area where it's just the natural soil and wood mulch on top. Two of them I planted directly in my grass lawn, and they are also thriving. DO NOT--are you reading this?--DO NOT use any fertilizers or soil amendments. It's unnecessary and can hurt your trees. Just use plain ol' soil from your ground. And I would recommend planting them where there is partial sunlight. Now that the sun is gracing us more with her presence here in Seattle, my cuttings have just sprouted some leaves. They haven't grown quite upwards yet, but I expect they will, and I WILL come back here to update and post photos. And for those of you wondering about the root system of these trees, these are NON-invasive. They will not spread throughout your yard, or your neighbor's yard like bamboo.

Update: Although they developed roots and sprouts, none of them are healthy or tall after 3 1/2 months. They frequently die off for no apparent reason then grow back weakly or not at all. I water them at least every week, sometimes every couple days. I fertilized them lightly with Miracle Grow (diluted) after two months and have sprayed them with insecticide because something eats their leaves. I don't think at this point any of them will develop into large or healthy trees, or work as a sound or wind break. So I lowered my rating to 2 stars and mow them all over with a lawn mower. I guess I'll try oak trees for a wind break because random oak seedlings in the yard are growing noticeably faster than these. Seemed like a cool idea, ended up being a waste of time. Based on my experience, the sellers claims seem far-fetched.

It's been exactly 12 months since I planted 26 of these in northeast Ohio. The tallest is 14ft and the shortest is 7ft. The majority are well over 10ft tall. They started as pencil sized sticks. For these to grow, you have to take a lot of care. This is what I did: -Placed in water for several weeks in March until roots began to show -Planted in fabric grow bags with potting soil and manure. Watered daily -Prepped the area by killing all weeds with Roundup. -Once leaves started to sprout I dug the holes and planted. -I ran a inexpensive utility hose along the entire planting area with nail holes perforating the areas where the plants would be. I then pin the hoses down with wire into the ground and set the hose on a daily timer for 1 hour. -I purchase some construction grade garbage bags and cut them into long 2-ft wide strips and laid them over the plants, cutting a small hole for the tree to stick out. This retains moisture and keeps the weeds from growing. -I then wrapped the base of each tree with chicken wire to prevent the rabbits from eating it. The rabbits will completely annihilate these twigs. And as they grow I spray them with deer repellent because the deer love them too. -Fast forward to the end of the growing season in September or October and the biggest tree was 14 ft. They all survived winter. The key is to constantly water these things with a slow drip. I did it for an hour a day for the entire summer. I'll taper that off once they are very established. If you're willing to take these steps I think they would work well for most people. These things are exploding and I can't wait to see how much bigger they get at the end of this year.