Question: What size of fruit and pecan trees should I buy?

Answer: Again, the answer is somewhat tied to the way you buy the tree. Bare-rooted fruit trees should be 3 to 5 feet tall. Bare-rooted pecans can be as tall as 4 to 6 feet. Buying taller trees increases the setback of transplant shock, plus it means that you’ll have a more difficult time training the trees to the proper branch structure. On the other hand, you don’t want to buy “runts” that may lack the necessary vigor to establish and grow actively. Container-grown trees won’t suffer the transplant shock, so you can go to larger specimens. Be careful, however, that those larger trees won’t have to be trimmed excessively to develop the necessary “scaffold branching.”