Nursery stock size typically follows the normal curve when lifted for planting stock. The runts at the lower end of the scale are usually culled to an arbitrary limit, but, especially among bareroot stock, the range in size is commonly considerable. Dobbs (1976) and McMinn (1985a) examined how the performance of 2+0 bareroot white spruce related to differences in initial size of planting stock. The stock was regraded into large, medium, and small fractions according to fresh weight. The small fraction (20% of the original stock) had barely one-quarter of the dry matter mass of the large fraction at the time of outplanting. Ten years later, in the blade-scarified site, seedlings of the large fraction had almost 50% greater stem volume than had seedlings of the small fraction. Without site preparation, large stock were more than twice the size of small stock after 10 years.