For those of you who may be interested in a cheaper, faster solution, I moved about (25) 8-12 ft blue spruce last fall with a scoop I made for the 400x loader on my JD 4120. I have a heavy duty bucket on it that is about 6 ft wide. There are 9/16" dia holes spaced across the front cutting edge of the bucket for mounting a toothbar, etc. I had a piece of 12" wide x 3" channel iron about 30" long that I simply bolted flat-side-up to the bottom center of the bucket using a couple of these holes, plus I drilled another hole further back on center. I honestly spent no money and less than 1/2 hour to make this "scoop" and it has worked far better than I could have imagined. To transplant the trees, I simply use the scoop, which protrudes about 20" ahead of the bucket, to remove 4-5 scoops from the intended planting location, forming a hole. Then I drive over to the tree I want to move, stab at about a 45 degree angle until the scoop is buried under the center of the tree, get off the tractor and wrap a small chain around the trunk, get back on and curl the bucket back and the tree pops right out. Then I drive it over to the hole, remove the chain and slide the tree into the hole. The hole process takes little more than 10 minutes for a 10 foot tree. It works so good in fact that this fall I am going to use it again to move about (25) more that I planted a little to thick a few years back. The channel iron I used for the scoop is quite heavy, aproximately 3/8" thick across the wide (12") section and at the bottom edge of the 3" sides, but close to 3/4" thick at the corners. The tractor bucket is also very heavily constructed, not the light-duty one standerd on the 400X. The first few trees I moved last fall was before the ground softened up, but the scoop penetrated well and no damage occurred to either the scoop or the bucket in spite of the soil being almost like concrete due to a long dry spell in the late summer. Admittedly, the rig worked a lot better a few weeks later after a few good rains, when pushing the scoop was like pushing a hot knife into butter. It is much better for tree survivability to wait until soil moisture content is higher anyhow. Prior to getting a front loader, I used to move trees with a pond scoop on the rear 3 point hitch. That was only a slight improvement over a shovel and ball cart, probably taking 45 minutes on average for moving 10-footers, as considerabe hand digging was still required to pop the trees out and dig a proper hole. The only drawback since getting the front loader is that I get less excercise and have to put in more time at the gym to keep in shape.
