Jordan and I excel at making our lives more difficult than they need to be. Maybe it’s the product of a chaotic past decade that we don’t know how to come down off of. Or a desire to distract ourselves from more difficult tasks. Whatever the reason, sometimes we make choices that I look back on and laugh at.
One of those decisions was the choice to order over 200 baby trees from a local nursery that specializes in native tree species. I’m not saying that this was inherently a bad decision. In fact, I think it’s a pretty cool thing to do, and I’d recommend other folks do it too. Just maybe not in the same year that they’ve bought a house, started a new job, and had a baby–amongst a variety of other projects. Even when we ordered them–months in advance–we knew that it would take an immense effort on both our parts to get them all planted quickly enough that they’d survive. Did that dissuade us? No. Should it have? Probably.
However, we still managed it. Last Mother’s Day weekend, instead of going out for a nice brunch and drinking a nice Bloody Mary (basically the only cocktail I’m interested in imbibing) Jordan picked up our baby trees from the nursery and we got busy planting them on our back 17 acres.
As expected, it was an intensive effort. When we first got the trees, we pulled them out of their brown bags and crammed as many of them as possible into a bucket of water, to keep them from drying out.
We’d decided in advance where we wanted which species–we wanted a barrier of evergreens between our house and the highway, so we saved the sturdiest looking trees for that spot. And then we’d gotten a mix of evergreens–which we hoped would provide shelter for wildlife–and a mix of wetland-specific trees and shrubs to plant throughout the remainder of our land. All the trees we got are native to our area, which was important to us: in helping to reforest our land, we wanted to make sure that we were supporting
Then we got to work. It took one entire day and then a half day to get everything planted, and everyone pitched in (except W, who hitched a ride on my back. He did help by being pretty chill about it all though).
When I first imagined planting over 200 trees, I was envisioning more work per tree. I figured we’d be laboriously digging each hole, placing the tree in, and backfilling it. Add in thick vegetation to wade through between each spot, and I figured we’d be working for a solid week.
But instead, all it took was a press of the shovel with a booted foot to split the earth, and then we were able to slip each baby tree into place and press the split back together again. For a few of the bigger trees–mainly the red pines, which were about a foot longer than any of the other species–we had to dig more of a hole. But even then, it went quickly.
We created an assembly line of sorts to get it done quickly: Jordan made the holes, I dropped in the trees and tucked them into the ground. On the first day, H (the three year old) gamely trooped out into the field with us, helping to hand us trees as we needed them. On the second day, L (the six year old), got into it, and he got to be the one to press each little tree into the earth.
But Jordan was the one who did the bulk of the work. When the kids got hot and hungry–or the baby needed a nap–I trooped back inside with them to hold down the fort, while Jordan kept planting.
While we were doing it, we felt largely pessimistic about the trees’ survival. Bare root seedlings have survival rates of 70-90%, so we were expecting to have to replant many next year. They were so small. And at that number, we couldn’t manage to do the many things they’d need to boost their survival rates–like watering them, weeding around them, and protecting them from hungry mouths.
It’s been several months since then though, and shockingly, it seems like the majority have made it through transplant, and are already growing rapidly–each little pine already has several inches of growth on it. We ended up sticking a witch hazel plants in our front yard–it’s fun to keep an eye on it and watch as it slowly grows and settles in, and I’m looking forward to one day having those pretty yellow flowers late into the fall.
And despite the chaos, I’m glad we did it. They may not survive. They’ll have many challenges ahead–drought, storms, floods. And even if they do make it, we may not be the ones to get to sit in their shade. But knowing that we tried–knowing that each little sapling has a shot at growing up to be a giant, graceful tree–feels to me like the essence of hope.
Feathery Thoughts 