I was an about to bump every single Yangmei group buy thread to ask about the long term survival rate so I’m glad you posted this thread. Based off of personal experience and from questioning others that purchased trees, the survival rate has been very low.
The survival rate also seems to depend on the variety and the size of the tree. When I received my friend’s trees in this last group buy, the roots were were completely dried out. I have quite a bit of experience with bare root trees and I’ve rehabilitated many bare root Yangmei trees from the various group buys and only two out of 9 trees from this last group buy survived.
I’ve been running many experiments on rootstocks, grafting techniques, fertilizers, humidity, lighting, and I’ve successfully grafted hundreds of Yangmei trees and my survival rate is still very low from this last group buy.
Having stated this, we go into these group buys knowing that the risks are high and the survival rates are extremely low so it should not be a shock to anyone if only 10-20% or less survive. I’m sure that some people that ordered only a few trees have zero surviving trees. There are probably also others out there that have extremely high success rate if their trees happened to be the ones towards the bottom of the box where the roots didn’t completely dry out.
These bare root trees are still the safest way to legally get these trees into the US although they can still come with unwanted hitchhikers like RKN.
Going to fill out the survey now!
Simon