My wife and I are planning to landscape our front yard but first, I need to remove some existing vegetation. Fortunately for me, I have 2 large junipers waiting to become specimen one day. Here’s my question, I live in Southern California so when should I plan to dig these junipers out of the ground? It’s just starting to get warm here consistently so they’re probably just breaking dormancy right now. Did i miss my window or can this still be done this year? I want to do this right, they’re probably 25+ years old.

Thanks everybody

My guess would have been that you already have them growing. At least, here in Northern germany all my junipers are growing fulll swing for a few weeks already, and I finished repotting.

I guess it depends how dry it gets. You can transplant junipers for a few months in spring, assuming you gets lots of humidity in the air. Dry winds are killers for recently collected junipers.

What you could consider doing is cutting the main roots now on maybe 1/2 of the rootball. Take a spade and push it in, maybe 30cm (1ft) fro the trunk. Then rotate a quarter turn around the trunk, and do it again. Do this untill you have gone around. You would now have cut half of the roots, in 4 sections of the rootball. When you harvest next year you should have a more condensed rootball.

Or you can just go for it. Transplant (Try to not clean out the rootbal, but chuck it in a pot). Then keep the roots relatively dry (Not dusty but certainly not soaking) and mist the foliage as often as you can (Keeping the water from extensively dripping into the pot. Give it some morning and evening sun (Assuming california midday sun to be brutal already) and protect from wind.

Thanks for the feedback. I live east of the coast so humidity fluctuates quite a bit and the weather in my area has been much more wet than normal. We get a thorough soaking about every 4-5 years in SoCal just before we go into another drought. I’m tempted to just go for it on one of the Junipers and see how it manages. We’ll be in the 70’s until about July and I think these guys are just now waking up. I’ll probably get a big tub for a pot and preserve as much of the root ball as possible while removing a good amount of foliage. Fingers crossed....

Thanks!

Get it in the smallest pot possible. Wet roots and too much space are a bigger problem than roots being just barely put in.