If you can till the soil (dig a planting hole), the tree is still dormant (no bud movement yet) or all danger of frost has passed, you can plant now.

Al

is it in a pot, or in a bag?

It's in a pot. Got it at Lowe's and looks very healthy.
Funny I was digging a hole to plant it in and the hole is filling with water there is 21/2 " of water in the hole!!! Guess I'll have to wait a while to plant! I was told this part of OK gets lots of moisture but holy cow!!!
Tomorrow I'll dig a hole on the other side of the yard for the dogwood tree see if I get water there too.

It rained here yesterday. It doesn't rain enough to suit me. Look up dogwood before you plant. Dogwood does better with a little shelter than out in the blazing sun. I see some in the open but they naturally grow on the edge of the woods. The cherry will want good drainage and will like the sun. Look them up though before you plant. I had a North Star dwarf cherry for years and it was a good plant. They say sweet cherries don't grow well where I live - east of you. Maybe someone else will have better information to give you here.

Sorie, If the trees are dormant they'd be fine now, If they are blooming, your blooms may freeze, but if you cannot keep them in a garage or someplace above freezing on the cold nights, you might as well go ahead and plant them now.

We are on the wild roller coaster ride that is late winter/early spring weather here, so often we have high temperatures in the 70s or 80s even though we still have occasional nights well below freezing. Last week our high temp at our house was 80 degrees and our low temp was 14. One plum tree started blooming about 24 hours before the cold night hit, and its blooms froze and dropped right off the tree. That's fairly typical at this time of the year, especially with the stone fruit plants like cherries, peaches, plums, nectarines, etc.

The fact that you hit water while digging probably is not a good sign, but it isn't surprising given your location. Depending on how far you are from the lake and on the elevation of your land, you may find you have a pretty high water table there. It seems to me that Carol can hit water when digging on her property pretty much any day of the year.

I want to reinforce what Helen said about cherry trees liking good drainage. They really need to be planted in an area where their roots do not sit in water during persistently rainy periods. I plant our stone fruit trees on the highest parts of our sloping property because otherwise they'd drown in the wet years. I only have a couple of wet years a decade, but I think most of your years would be considered pretty wet. If your soil drains well, cherry trees will do fine planted at grade level. Where I live, they do better if planted in raised beds above grade level.

My average last frost date is March 28th and you're a lot farther north but also farther east, so yours would be sometime in early to mid-April. Remember, though, that once we arrive at our average last frost date, there's still a 50% chance of having a frost. In 6 of the last 7 years (and not counting this year), the last frost at our house has been in the first week of May. That makes it really hard to get a good crop here from stone fruit consistently, so I've learned to enjoy the beauty of the trees when they are in bloom and then to be thrilled in the increasingly rare years in which we actually get fruit.

The kind of dogwood trees you can plant up there are different from what I can plant here because I have very alkaline soil and water and your soil should be a lot more acidic there. The native rough-leaf dogwoods that live here our on property don't bloom until April, so rarely get frozen back very much. Cherry trees here? They freeze back while in bloom more than half the time in my area.

I have a friend here who got a great cherry harvest, and it was back around 1992-1993-1994, though I don't remember which year. They froze so many cherries that they still had some in the freezer around the year 2000. He still has a cherry tree, but I don't know if he's had more than 1 or 2 fruit harvests since that wonderful year.

Dawn

You might want to consider planting the cherry tree "on top of the ground", and dumping topsoil all around it to mount it up. That way, you would be sure it wasn't sitting in water.

The reason I asked bagged or potted, is cause with potted you don't have to be in a real hurry to plant.

But no matter what, it would be better if the tree didn't get a chance to make fruit this year, but puts its energy in to growing a nice strong root system.

Moni

thanks everyone. The water is starting to evaporate or go back in to the ground! So I may be ok.